“Not being a commodity enough to be hired by the big directors for projects that have some kind of integrity.”

It’s been very helpful for my career, but I’m trying to stay on the path I was on before.

My dad told me, ‘It takes fifteen years to be an overnight success’, and it took me seventeen and a half years.

So there’s more competition, so you have to work harder and be right for it.

The problem is when you become so well known that everyone is watching you and you don’t have an opportunity to observe.

Part of what attracted me to the village was it had a lot of parallels to contemporary issues.

You meet a pretty girl, you’re different from when you meet a tough kid on the street.

We were all kind of thrown into the woods and we didn’t have any of the modern conveniences that we take for granted.

So that isn’t the concern. You have to do what you can do, and share what you feel is appropriate to share in the moment.

I take a lot less for granted.

The normal routine is always the same thing whether it’s on a new movie or a new job

If something is incredibly difficult to connect to, and painful, then I have to do a lot of work to connect to that and not joke around or lose sight of my job.

If I have a lack of dedication or focus, it’s permanently there as a negative reminder.

And then, it’s out of your control.

I really had a blast.

It would be terribly boring to be earnest.

You get to know one another very quickly.

My favorite directors are Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Patrick Daughters.

We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects.

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.

Somehow, we [ Tan Dun and director Chen Kaige] were all privileged at the time; we could be outside of China. But at the moment, we had no sense of what the future was going to be like.

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn’t need to have muscles.

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high – you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

When I was creative director [at Estée Lauder], I was always being asked about my beauty must-haves. From there I had this fun idea to create a line of what was in my makeup bag. But I also love accessories, and people associate me with home, family, and beauty.

When I took the job as Estée Lauder’s creative director, the first thing I did was go into the archives! I love taking our heritage and making it modern.