I got a horror film, 'The Burning,' and suddenly I was making crazy money, like a thousand a week, so I moved into an apartment on Amsterdam with a guy who was also in 'The Burning,' Jason Alexander.
Holly Hunter
I was born and raised on a farm, where boys had chores and girls did not, i.e., drive tractors, bale hay, take care of cattle.
People think I disappear sporadically, but I just do projects that don't get international acclaim.
The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that's as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there's so many things I don't know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures - maybe even 18 or 19 of them - when I get on a subway car every day.
I'm not religious. I'm not an atheist. Would I say I'm an agnostic? Possibly. But I would say the collective unconscious is something I'm much more interested in.
Privacy is paradise.
With 'Broadcast News,' it became a non-issue, and with 'The Piano,' it became a non-issue. Both parts were written for more statuesque women. It was nice to change people's minds about that, because that's neither here nor there.
In many parts, I start from the outside and then it triggers things within. For 'The Piano,' I went, 'I'm going to learn these piano pieces. I'm going to learn this sign language, and I'm going to do them all day every day, five days a week.' It was a totally physical thing.
I heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once. And you know, tennis, it's not a good place for that.
There's a tremendous amount of humor... in very unexpected places.
It's not like television is now for women who have been put out to pasture. Television is for everybody.
The whole idea of death is something that we tend to kind of really not deal with at all.
I don't offer advice to actors only because I've seen actors become successful through ways that would never even occur to me or that wouldn't work for me. But this has worked for me: Never memorizing a scene.
There's no way that anyone can know the ebb and flow of one's career. You can't know that. You can tell young actors it's going to be very difficult, but there's no way you can understand the difficulties and the rewards through description. You have to cellularly experience it.
I think that the audience feels a real connection with Zoe Kazan because she's so instantly lovable.
Sometimes it's the lead, but there are not always leads out there, so then it's an interesting supporting character, or there's a lot of dough, although that happens less and less. Let's have a good laugh about that one.
As we get older, people close down. We get less adaptive, less flexible - literally. Curiosity can diminish, and you want safety. You want what you know.
I think that, initially, I was most passionate about music and particularly about playing the piano. I started playing when I was nine, and I was obsessed with it, really. I wouldn't even go spend the night at a friend's unless they had a piano. But I didn't have the chops, the extraordinary talent to be able to play the piano professionally.
I get cold really quickly, but I don't care. I like weather. I never understand why people move someplace so that they can avoid weather.
I'm a practicing Catholic. And faith is very, very important to me. It was pounded in my head as a kid, and I hated it. And I sort of lost my way in my 20s and part of my 30s and then found my way back. And I don't know what I'd do without it. It's huge in my life.
Do I trust myself? Sometimes I don't even know, but I can only just kind of throw my hat in the ring and hope for the best. Depending on how much I trust the other people is how much freedom I can allow myself to have on that particular set.
Sometimes you have to marinate instead of making a quick decision. I appreciate my instincts, but my instincts can be dead wrong. Circumspection can give you time.
Pixar has the integrity to not rush.
Is there a higher energy? I would say yes, even if the energy is collective. Even if it's kind of Jungian, or the whole thing is collective consciousness, that may be God as far as I'm concerned. So is there an energy that's higher than mine? Yes.
I grew up on a farm. The worst-looking chickens are the best layers. The ones that are the scraggliest... those are usually the ones that are really cooking.
People have always searched for answers. That's why we have religion; people have always been seeking some relief from their own mortality.
Sometimes it's very difficult to do a movie that's good and then have that movie make it to the light of day.
What people have thought of me, of the turns that I've taken, has never really played into my decisions.
My life has a great degree of dimension without making movies.
New Yorkers have an intimacy with Trump, man. I mean, for decades.
It's the same with people knowing absolutely everything there is to know about an actor. I actually think the more personal information you have about an actor, the more you have to carve out for yourself when you go to a movie and see them in it.
Even very ordinary people, upon closer examination, can often look extraordinary.
I don't mind at all venturing off to do a television movie if it's gonna give me something new to mess around in my mind, to turn around in.
I heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once.
What is God, and how do you believe in him - how do you not believe? It's a question the world continues to tussle with. People's beliefs get them in a lot of conflicts.
The happiest person in the world has struggled. And none of us are perfect. And people can judge. There's so much judgment going on. And I just don't think that's what God's about.
I would say, yeah, I'm a spiritual person.
I guess I'm more of a direct person than an indirect one.
I'm not a classically beautiful person, but hopefully it increases my longevity as an actress that my career isn't dependent on my great, great good looks.
My nucleus of friends or something protects me from the machinery that is Hollywood. I don't think I'm on the same quest that a lot of people are. I guess that could be a limitation.
I like the South: Southern literature and that relationship between grotesqueness and living below the Mason-Dixon line. But I also understand that people view it as a limitation - as an actor and as a person - perceptions that are really wrong: that you are ignorant and possibly illiterate, or that it's cute.
My career has never really been a vertical kind of thing. I mean, it's always been a bit difficult for me.
Being somebody who's like a theater geek that I am, I can just go right back to Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles: they were writing about gods and goddesses versus humans, and how gods could distort, pervert, or help people get what they want.
I've worked with a lot of female directors over the course of my career: Martha Coolidge, Catherine Hardwicke, Jodie Foster.
For every movie that you go see, how many leading male roles are there in any given movie, and how many leading female roles are there? There may be 5 or 6 really good roles for guys and maybe one for a woman. And it doesn't even matter if you're 25. That's just the logistics.
I believe that there is good. I believe there is evil. Do I believe that they come from God who is watching us conduct myriad never-ending wars and looks benignly on because there's higher purpose to all of this? I don't think so.
The self-help section of national bookstore chains in America is one of the largest sections. In a way, it's nothing new, and in another way, very new. People have always searched for answers; that's why we have religion. People have always been seeking some relief from their own mortality.
It's considered a coup to become a lead on a kind of cutting-edge television series. I mean, that's a plus for your feature film career and for your career in general. There are no walls anymore between the two.
It's great to go to the cinema and have a conversation about something that is almost taboo.
This is one of the reasons I like to act - it's because acting forces you into situations you don't know.
