“I always, always meant to be on stage. I only ended up even auditioning for television and movies because I was understudying a Turgenev play on Broadway and was so broke that, when I got a mini-series, I had to take it and was so ashamed because I was such a snob.”

“Before 'Schindler's List,' I wouldn't have believed movies had a lot of power for social change.”

“I mean, why am I considered an 'it girl?' Because I'm in a lot of movies right now or am on the covers of magazines? I just hope there is something solid behind that. Because here's the thing with 'it girl' status. It's great and amazing that anybody is saying that at all. But how long does that last?”

“I love movies with spectacle but spectacle can be a performance, it doesn't have to be a creature.”

“The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago, and they're all driven by the possibilities of CGI, which means you can make anything happen on screen that you can possibly desire.”

“My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'”

“As a kid, I liked the 'Halloween' movies and 'Nightmare On Elm Street' and all that kind of stuff. But as an adult, I really don't watch much horror, to be honest.”

“I mean, movies in general tend to sort of portray time, space and identity as these very solid things. Time moves forward. Space is what it is. You are you, and you're always you.”

“I really like children to watch my movies.”

“When I started to watch some of the films I'd done, I realized I was doing movies that I might not actually want to see.”

“I don't make the best movies in the world, but at times, I do feel like I'm adding something to the cinematic community.”

“Some movies bring out the creativity in you. Every single audience member can become creative in the face of a particular movie. If you happen to like my films, it's because my films provide a bed for you on which you can find your creativity. The Hollywood movies do not provide that for you.”

“Movies these days have made killers into funny people. What's that all about? I've got kids and family and friends, and I don't like bad things. I don't think they're funny, and it's irresponsible to make movies that don't show you how that's not good.”

“I love music, and after my first experience with movies, I can't wait to do more.”

“I've had such a great track record in making a huge profit when the movies are smaller.”

“Of course for many years directors have had to go on the road with their movies and promote them and I've done that since the beginning. So that's not new but the forms of it are different such as with the internet.”

“I don't know many women who can relate to Sharon Stone and the kind of movies she does. I don't know a lot of guys who can relate to Tom Cruise's movies because they're on a kind of fantastic level.”

“Sundance is weird. The movies are weird - you actually have to think about them when you watch them.”

“There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters what happens to them is not lifelike.”

“A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.”

“Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.”