Quotes

Never eat a Mars Bar offered to you by Marianne Faithfull.

I'm a wreck. I get hurt very easily. I don't have a tough shell. I'm so insecure - it's pretty stupid for me to be in this business, isn't it?

(2011, on landing Pulp Fiction (1994)) Quentin [Tarantino] called me and invited me to go to coffee with him at Swingers, I remember. I think people were talking about me, my agents or somebody, so I had heard about this film. But I had known about Quentin because of his writing. He had a film that... before it became Natural Born Killers (1994), it was called Mickey And Mallory. It was one of the best screenplays I'd ever read in my life, and I wanted to do it. And there was talk of it, but I read the screenplay years before it was actually made by Oliver Stone. I wanted to do that movie so bad! So there was a point where people were talking to me about doing it, so that's how I discovered his writing. And my sister [Patricia Arquette] did True Romance (1993). I just remember him wanting to go and have coffee. So we went to Swingers and had a meal at the counter and talked. And I got to play Jody. So that was neat...I love to see the humor in things, so for me, it was really fun and effortless. I do have a dark sense of humor anyway, so that was fun to do that. He's a master director and writer, but what he was able to do and how he's become that is because he puts together his cast and he rehearses like it's a play. We had all of this rehearsal time, so you could work things out and discover and play.

(2011, on making The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978) with Bette Davis) I remember a day where a camera broke. We were in Ohio, and it was hot. The heat was really hellacious. And she kind of grabbed me, gave me a hug, and sat me on her lap, and said, "This is Hell. And just remember, you cannot have a career and a relationship. It will never work." And it haunted me all my life! And you know what? God, she was right! Well, that's not true. Some people do it. But I just remember her telling me this, and I was, like, "Really? Is that the truth?" And, you know, The Red Shoes was always such an influence on my life, and I opened my documentary, Searching for Debra Winger (2002), with that: a woman who has to choose between her art and her love, but she can't make that choice, so she kills herself. It was very haunting, her saying that to me.

(2011, on After Hours (1985)) Probably the most fun I've ever had working, even though we were all so exhausted. Because we did night shooting. The whole thing was done at night. So, basically, you'd start work at 4 in the afternoon and go to 5:30 or 6 in the morning, 'til the sun rose. It was such a fun time. Sleep deprivation can make you a little kooky. So that alone inspired me. And there's another director [Martin Scorsese] who loves to rehearse, but then lets his actors do their thing and gives you complete freedom and trust. Once you have that from a director, then you're just free to do anything. Because you know they have faith in you, then you have faith in them, and it's a great creative marriage when that happens.

(2011, on Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)) Well, it was really one of the first films that was all female. The studio head was Barbara Boyle, it was female producers, female writers, a female director. It was one of the first out of the box like that. That didn't really happen. A female-driven movie about females? It just didn't happen like that. You didn't see films with women running them in every way, shape, or form. I remember that one of the producers, Sarah Pillsbury, had just had a baby, and there was a discrepancy during filming about whether Roberta had amnesia at this point in the film or not. There was this back-and-forth bickering. Because it was shot out of sequence, and we'd be confused about whether she still had amnesia. So we were all in a little huddle, and... we were all weeping! I'll never forget that. It was, like, "There you go: This is why they don't have movies done with all women." That just cracked me up. It was only just that one moment, but we were all in such a hormonal state trying to work this thing out. And then we all laughed. It was, like, "Okay, this is silly, let's get back to work." So we figured it out, we went back to work, and it was all good.

(2011, on working with Madonna on Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)) She had no acting experience. But she certainly had a presence. She was becoming the biggest thing in the world as we were doing the film. So she wasn't that big, but she was this presence on MTV, so I kept seeing the "Lucky Star" video and just being obsessed with how gorgeous she was. She has that star quality. She really does. It's like Angelina Jolie, where she walks in and you just go, "Wow..." She has it. And she always had that presence. I'm really looking forward to seeing her movie that she directed. I've heard it's good, and I'm really excited for her. We got to know each other during that film, and for a while we were really close. I just found an album of Like A Virgin where she wrote, "Rosanna, I love you!" I thought, "I should really frame that." But we've lost touch over the years. I wish her well, though, and I'm happy for her that she's doing so well. And that she has such beautiful children.

(2011, on Crash (1996)) I loved working with [David] Cronenberg. He does these very kind of twisted, intense films, but he's sort of a soft-spoken, really nice, normal guy. You'd never think the stuff was coming out of him. It was a very strange time. My baby was 1 year old, and I was breast-feeding, yet here I was doing this weird, dark film. But I had a great time working with Holly Hunter and James Spader. Just wonderful actors. It was a good time...I was also doing the movie Gone Fishin' (1997) at the same time I was doing Crash. So I had to go down and do this movie with Joe Pesci and Danny [Glover], and then fly back up and do Crash (1996), and then back down again.

(2011, on What About Brian (2006)) Let me just say this: I think it was a really good show. People stopped me all the time to tell me that they loved that television show, and I guess ABC... They have a new regime now, but the regime then just didn't get it. People loved that show. And they kept changing the timeslot, changing this, changing that. I don't know what really happened with it. J.J. Abrams was an executive producer on it, but he wasn't there for the day-to-day. Too bad: If he had been, we might've been on the air forever. I don't know if it was a political thing, but it didn't make sense. Dana Stevens is a really good writer, but... You know, I felt like there wasn't a lot for me to do, so it was a little frustrating. But it could've been quite a big show, had they given it a chance.

Martin Scorsese's never negative. He said, 'Do you think you should laugh in this scene?' 'Oh, no, Marty, I can't see where she'd laugh.' 'Oh, yeah, you're right. Forget I ever said anything.' That's what he does, very subtly: like he planted the seed, watered it and split. As I was doing the scene, I don't know where it came from, but I just started laughing.

(On Promised a Miracle (1988)) I'm proud of CBS for saying yes to this movie. This is an important story to tell. I took this on because a lot of children are dying in the United States this way, and it's wrong. It's OK for people to have faith and believe in God. We're not putting down the church or Christianity. God gave people the intelligence to create medicine to heal. It's really tragic when a child has to die because of negligence. What a terrible mistake! These people blew it. It should never happen again.

(On The Executioner's Song (1982)) It was hard, because I remember the scene in the car, when he's screaming at the car, and it really scared [the kids]. They didn't know. I hate that. I was trying to talk to them and tell them that we were pretending, but they were too young to understand that it was just pretend. You can see me looking upset and trying to protect them. When we were finished with the take, I said, "Okay, that's it. One take, done. I'm not scaring these kids anymore.

(On directing) I felt much more comfortable in my own skin and not so isolated. It was like hooking up with this tribe of women and artists.

(On posing for Playboy) I was in a bathing suit in Florida with Burt Stern, the great photographer who shot Marilyn Monroe on the beach with a sweater, and we smoked a joint and the bathing suit kept coming off in the water and I just ripped it off and was very comfortable with being naked. If anything, they're not even great photographs, they're ugly photographs. They stencilled the Playboy bunny on my T-shirt... so we sued them.

I'll never stand for the flag again.

I worked with Sondra Locke as a director in 1996. She was thoughtful and kind ..had laser vision she was great with actors.