On Lolita (1997): "I don't think there needs to be a movie out where a child has sex with an adult."
On Lolita (1997): I think there's enough exploitation out there that it's not nescessary to do more.
Young actors often don't think of the consequences of doing nudity or sex scenes. They want the role so badly that they agree to be exploited, and then end up embarassing family, friends, and even strangers.
On acting: "I started to do this at age 11. At age 20, I might say, this is enough."
On violence in the media: "We live in a violent world, but since the success of films like Pulp Fiction (1994), it seems every movie has some violence in it, and it's now being used as a form of comedy: audiences are now being encouraged to laugh when people get their heads blown off. I just don't like hearing people laugh at violence."
I also feel I'm a positive role model by not putting my education on hold.
I want to use college to explore what other careers I might be interested in.
On acting: "I'm taking it day by day. Right now I like acting, but if something else sparks my interest in college, I'll do that. It's so limiting to say, this is it for the rest of my life. There are so many things that interest me: I love math, science, literature, languages."
On Lolita (1997): "Let me tell you, this movie's going to be sleaze."
I'm going to college. I don't care if it ruined my career. I'd rather be smart than a movie star.
I don't know if acting is what I want to do for the rest of my life, it's just what I've, you know, ended up doing when I was little, and I've kinda grown up with it.
When I'm working they pretty much treat me like an adult, but then when there's a break everyone else goes to their trailers and drinks beer and I like, go to school.
There's so much else to do in the world. To just be interested in doing films would limit my life.
I think school is so much harder than real life. People are so much more accepting when they are adults.
Danny [Aiello] told me, 'Don't do television.'
Cute is when a person's personality shines through their looks. Like in the way they walk, every time you see them you just want to run up and hug them.
"I've never tried smoking. I don't drink. I've never tried drugs." (Australian Dolly August 2000)
"Politics is easy to segue into from acting. I'm very interested in it, though I would never run for office. But after this, anything I do is going to seem very bizarre to me." (Interview October 1999)
"No, but I've been thinking about it a lot. I love acting, but I don't know if there's something out there that I love more. That's what college is going to be about for me - checking things out." (Interview October 1999)
When asked by Seventeen magazine what advice she had for teenagers going off to college she said, "I would say practicing laundry it's so hard." (November 1999)
"There is a lot lacking on the intellectual side and on the values side when being an actor." (Seventeen, November 1999)
Told the November 1999 issue of Mademoiselle magazine that she wished she knew David Letterman because, "He seems to be so smart, but you never get to hang out with him after the show."
When asked by German Cosmopolitan (3/00) if she would like having herself as a daughter she replied, "Well of course. I am a good person, nice, smart, witty, trustworthy, know nice people, don't do drugs and earn a lot of money." On what she likes about her parents: "They have made it quite clear that they believe I can be great. Had my parents expected less of me,I would not be the person I am now. And I am very happy with myself." (German Cosmopolitan March 2000)
"I'm not planning to be an actress as an adult, I'm planning other things for my future." Source: Venice Magazine July 1995
I don't think I'd be able to deal with just acting, because I don't know if you get to use your brain that much. You do, for certain roles, but not most. Acting is more of a hobby for me.
There's a big intellectual aspect that's kind of lacking, " she says of acting in films. "Right now I supplement that through being in school. I'm not sure I'd be happy if I was just acting. I haven't explored a lot of other avenues. Hopefully I'll figure it out by the end of school, so I know what I want to do with my life.
When asked about her prom dress: "A designer is going to give me something to wear. It's the most amazing perk I have."
I didn't have this undying need to be an actress. I didn't have that fire in me ever -- at any point. And still, I don't think I have that within me.
I don't really know if acting would have ultimately become my passion as an adult, or if there's something else I would have found had I not been in the pizza shop. That's what college is helping me investigate.
I'm ready to ditch the movies and keep at the books. There are so many other things, and it would feel limiting to say, 'Acting is it for me.'... I love psychology. That's what I'm studying right now. It would probably be difficult, because of my current occupation, to become a clinical psychologist, but I could certainly do research. And I'd like to have a family someday, too.
It's horrible to be a sex object at any age, but at least when you're an adult you can make the decision if you want to degrade yourself.
"I don't go wagging my boobs around in people's faces" - Rolling Stone (USA) June, 2002
I couldn't be anorexic because I like food too much, and I couldn't be bulimic because I hate throwing up too much.
"I've wanted to be an astronaut, a doctor, a vet - these are things I've said in interviews. Before that, I wanted to be a mermaid and a fairy".
"I was in a relationship recently with someone who yelled at me for being too much in my head, you know? He said I was thinking too much about everything".
"I usually run three or four times a week now. Pretty boring, but it's so worth it. It's done wonders for my mood".
I basically have a little boy's body. They tell me, 'OK, this is where we're going to push up your cleavage,' and I'm like, 'What cleavage?'
On traveling through Morocco with a guide and sleeping in tents: "They knew that I am Israeli, and yet they still opened the doors of their houses for me, offering me tea. They all were nice and hospitable."
As I look back on it, I'm glad that I had this false image. I was who everyone else - my parents, my friends, society - wanted me to be. I was a pleaser, someone who wanted to make everyone happy, to not let anyone down. Now, I'm not like that.
My contemporaries in Israel have a love for life that's amazing. There, there is not the luxurious and rich existence of material goods of Hollywood films, every day they struggle to survive, but they still have an enthusiasm difficult to find elsewhere.
My grandfather was a Polish Jew and a socialist, and as a youngster he helped to organize special camps to teach agriculture to all the young men that were moving to Israel, where in 1930, they created the first kibbutz.
At college I began to do research for a professor and so I became part of the organization promoted by the Queen of Jordon: the Foundation for International Community Assistance. That offers microcredits, offering small loans of money to women who want to start their own businesses. The interest is very low and the results are extraordinary.
I'm pretty much a boring Goody Two-shoes. I've definitely gotten drunk before, I don't think it's possible to go through college without getting drunk, but I don't really like it at all. I actually tried my first cigarette last year at school. I just figured, if many people are smoking, there must be something to it, and before I pooh- pooh it I should at least know what it's about. I took one puff and I was like, OK, I was right. There's nothing to it. They're just wrong, it's disgusting.
I've been doing like one movie a year so I haven't made that many movies. A lot of girls my age have done 40 already, so I guess I'm a little behind.
I get like 400 Holocaust scripts. That's what you get for being the openly Jewish actress!
I wanted to be able to form my own sexual identity. If other people have you in their mind as some sort of sex object, you have two choices: either live up to it and become super-sexual or rebel against it and be super-asexual.
I'm the anti-Method actor. As soon as we finish a scene, I need to go back to being myself, because it freaks me out. But it was hard not to take this home with me. I would feel cheated on when I went home. There were weekend nights I would lie in bed instead of going out with my friends.
I had a bad early experience when "The Professional" came out. I'm really proud of the film, but it was strange for me to be looked at as a sexual object when I was 12.
I think it is a really beautiful thing that we have recognition within our industry - but it's not that important.
But we have to remember that almost all films are written and directed by men. Female characters are women imagined by men, so it's always this classic figure of a sexy woman with a childish innocence.
You walk into a nice strip club, the ones where the women are treated well - obviously 'well' is debatable - and the women just seem so powerful. Women have full control; they can get whatever they want from these guys. But they realise it is a tacit contract: they are that way because men want them to be like that. Obviously, if the men wanted them on the floor scrubbing their shoes they'd probably be doing that too.
"I see that my girlfriends, already at 23, are thinking, 'What career can I choose that will also suit having children?' And it is limiting. Whereas my male friends aren't thinking that way." - Premiere magazine
"Some people will think I'm a neo-Nazi or that I have cancer or I'm a lesbian. After all the crazy hairstyles I had to endure for the films, it's quite liberating to have no hair - especially in this heat." - about going bald
On filming Star Wars: "You learn after your first blue-screen movie, and more after your second, the extent to which you have to prepare. You have to come up with the scenery, the characters, the whole world, as well as what's going on with you. You're often talking to a tape mark instead of a character, and you have to project what they might be thinking, what's going on, how they're treating you."
On filming Free Zone in Jerusalem: "I was sleeping five hours a night and we were running from location to location and making up the story as we went along. There's a scene where my arms are uncovered and I'm very close to the guy. People got upset and we moved to another place. It was just crazy because they were calling us Nazis, and I think that's a little much."
I was the precocious one when I was younger, and now I'm the girlish one, which ultimately means I've stayed the same. Which is not a good sign.
People think the film industry is going to corrupt me. I wasn't really home when my friends were trying pot for the first time. I was always around adults who wouldn't curse or smoke or do anything like that around me.
The people whose secrets I most want to know are people who actually have families and marriages as well as careers - people like Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Julianne Moore. I think that if I were like mid-30s and didn't have kids yet I would probably start adopting or something. Aargh, I don't even have a boyfriend, and I'm talking about kids!
On starring in Closer (2004/I): "It's not exploitative, but it is about sex. No kids allowed. It's definitely a different thing for me, but I feel like I'm old enough to handle it now. I sort of understand more how to deal with it publicly, and it doesn't shatter me. I don't have to go to school the next day and have people be like, 'Oh I saw you in that movie; you were very dirty'".
I think, especially in those first few years of college, my body started changing a lot. I got hips. Your metabolism changes; you're not exercising as much. I ran track for a couple of years in high school, and I was also dancing. I was always doing something. At Harvard, you don't really join the team unless you're a star.
"They are all so very different, Episode III is very dark and much more demanding, we all know that Anakin becomes Darth Vader but to actually see this transition is very painful. So when you have such a dark story to work with it demands you as an actor to work harder. So even though I haven't seen the film yet I would suppose that the last one is my favorite". (On which of the three Star Wars prequels is her favorite)
I began Star Wars when I was 14 and I'm going to be 24 when this final movie comes out, so these movies were 10 years of my life and now I'm just trying to do something different.
I agree with Walter Murch's theory that digital will never have the emotional or visual power of regular film, because audiences respond to absences. Regular film has a split second of blank screen between each shot, which the audience's brain has to automatically fill in. Digital doesn't have that, so it doesn't engage the audience in the same ways. In all modernist literature, the most present thing is what's absent. Like the opening of The Sound and the Fury, where they're looking between the fence. Or in Closer the most important parts, the relationships, are missing and have to be filled in by the audience. Absences are crucial.
I was especially fascinated by memory studies. There was one that requested people's good and bad memories, and then checked them for content. But non- pathological people, people who maintain a happy, healthy brain, couldn't provide negative memories. They'd say, 'But I learned this from the experience;' they'd turn their negative memories into positive ones.
I get a copy of every action figure from Star Wars. I send them to charity. Some of the really cool ones I keep. Like there's a snow globe thing with one of the spacecrafts in it, which is also a music box, which I really love.
(asked if winning the Globe was a shock) God, yes! I was so sure I wasn't going to win it, I went up to Meryl Streep (nominated for The Manchurian Candidate) before the show and said, "You're going down." We'd done a play together, so I knew her pretty well, but to me, it was a big joke, like, I'm going to win against Meryl-yeah, right. When they called my name, all I could think was, oh no, Meryl's going to be mad at me!
(on the necklace she gave Julia Roberts) Oh, I made the mistake of telling one person I did that - now everyone loves this story! It was just a joke, because there were lots of dirty words in the script, and every time Julia had to say a bad word she got all blushy.
The moment you buy into the idea you're above anyone else is the moment you need to be slapped in the face.
I actually am starting to feel I should start a revolution against heels, even though that wouldn't be a dramatic revolution. Everyone around me says, 'You have to wear heels.' It's based on some silly concept that longer legs are more beautiful.
"In seventh grade I cried every single day when I came back from shooting The Professional. My friends were not my friends. They were saying, 'She thinks she's so hot now,' things like that, and it was the most painful thing I've ever gone through. Clearly, I haven't had that difficult a life." - Jane Magazine 1999
Ashley (Judd) and I went to this place called the Broken Spoke. You walk in and everyone's wearing cowboy hats and men come up to you and ask you to dance. We danced the two-step together, and all these men were coming up, saying, "It's not right to see two ladies dancing. Let us cut in!
There were stories in the house of what had happened to them (her grandparents during the Holocaust), and it wasn't that much talked about. I had to go on a website to read my grandfather's descriptions of what happened to the family.
[on Tom Tykwer, and working with him during his personal crisis] "The very first time we met we were able to tell each other so much about our personal experiences and what we were going through at the moment- my own experience was a similarly difficult and pivotal one for me, though obviously a bit more adolescent than Tom's. It was part of what made the film seem like a joint search for something, a joint expedition."
[on shooting the strip-club scene fully nude] "You can't do this stuff half-assed, pun intended."
[asked how she would like to be remembered] "I don't like that question. That question only provides irony if you prematurely die."
[Morocco] "When I finished V for Vendetta (2005), I went for a few days as sort of a birthday present for myself. I went out into the desert and an amazing storm was taking place, which is so unusual in the desert. I ended up in a tent with the six strangers whom I had just met, and had traveled with earlier on camel back. There we were, watching this amazing lightening in the middle of the desert. The tent was shaking and it was a really exciting experience."
I aspire to make more comedies because we never see enough good ones.
When I was nine and attending a Jewish school, we had different kosher lunches served. We weren't kosher at home. My mom used to make me chicken salad sandwiches and I would have to lie to everyone, saying it was tuna. "It doesn't smell like tuna," they'd say.
[On preparing for her role as Queen Amidala] "George worked with me a lot, on changing my voice and my movement and the way I carried myself. We worked on this accent that ... kinda goes to old, older generations of actresses who used kind of an unidentifiable accent. 'Is it American or is it British?' and I watched Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn. If you look at them, their voices and the stature is so regal, even in their everyday characters. And that's kinda why I used it to model after".
[On regretting doing nudity]: I'm really sorry I didn't listen to my intuition. From now on, I'm going to trust my gut more. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is say no.
Last year I did something that I wasn't comfortable with, and I'm really sorry I didn't listen to my intuition. There was a scene in a movie that felt inappropriate for me, but I didn't want to make waves... From now on, I'm going to trust my gut more. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is say 'no.' - Referring to a torture scene she filmed for Goya's Ghosts, to Parade
[On the dangers of too-early celebrity] I've been lucky enough that most of my big falls have been missed by the tabloids. And I think the other people have not been so lucky. It's a tricky thing, and not necessarily a positive thing,that young people are working and seeking this kind of attention. Getting this sort of attention changes them.
Overall, to get a real deep, nuanced understanding of human behaviour, art is the best way.
[on her mixed feelings about nudity] I'm really not prudish about doing nudity. I think it's beautiful in films, and sex is such a big part of life, and nudity is obviously our natural state. That's not my issue. My issue is that I feel it takes something away from what you're doing. And also that it can be used afterwards for different purposes. Misappropriated.
[On Hillary Clinton] A lot of the stuff people say about her, I hear it and my stomach falls because it's so sexist. You ask people why they don't like her and it's because her husband cheated on her! That was obviously not her choice. She's so much more polished and experienced than anyone else. Last night, a friend, a social worker in L.A. who works with underprivileged kids, was saying how these girls who have never been interested in politics before are so excited that a woman might be president. I mean, look how many women are in government...Hillary's one of, what, [a handful of] female senators? I also like Obama. I even like McCain. I disagree with his war stance -- which is a really big deal -- but I think he's a very moral person. I met him and Hillary on the same day, actually, when I went to Washington with Finca [a nonprofit that gives loans to businesswomen in developing countries]. Hillary was by far the smartest person I met that day. Just totally focused, and knew more about the issues than anyone else, and was so able to go from one thing to the other.