“My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young.”

Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing.

I love films for the fact that it is like working under a microscope. It is sort of like a laboratory.

I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.

I had been working early in my life in films – since I was 11.

In every character I play, I try to imbibe something. Every film is a learning process for me.

I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful.

There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold.

I want to present interesting stories that don’t qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

America makes up its own mind about what it wants to see.

I hear music as narrative.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

It paid my way through college and helped my family out.

You can still take the responsibility for being a scribe of your tribe.

I think that I have sold out sometimes.

I think that rap is narrative, when it’s done right.

Whenever I think of the high salaries we are paid as film actors, I think it is for the travel, the time away, and any trouble you get into through being well known. It’s not for the acting, that’s for sure.

There aren’t many downsides to being rich, other than paying taxes and having relatives asking for money. But being famous, that’s a 24 hour job right there.

I don’t think being a good James Bond girl has to do with nationality. I think it has to do with a specific person at a certain time being right for the specific needs of a given script. It has to do with talent and personality, regardless of nationality.

Acting is a mysterious process.

I like acting because I get to find different parts of myself, or at least create different parts that don’t already exist, and see the world through someone else’s eyes.

And Shanghai is amazing. I’m a fan of science fiction so when you’re there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it’s like a set in a movie.

I did a lot of acting at school and university, then I went to drama school. It was quite a normal route.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.