It's hard for me to understand how poverty can be invisible to so many people, since I see it everywhere. Readers sometimes think this world is so different; on the one hand, they feel connected to the people I'm writing about, and on the other hand, they're saying their lives are a world away.
God, for example, appealed to me as a beardless man wearing a quilted silk cap; holiness was something burning, forbidding, something connected with fire while a day had the form of an oblong box.
I want to take roles that challenge me and I want to like the script and obviously feel connected with the director because the director to me is so important.
Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect. This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage - as soon as you even attempt to engage.
You're going through the horror of it, you're going through the isolation of it but you're being empowered by reminding yourself that you're connected to everybody else.
With independent film, as an actor, you have more involvement - it's very much more connected. It's not just like I'm showing up and there's another actor on the call sheet; you're very attached to it.
When you strip hope from people, it leaves a void, and that void needs to be filled. And very likely, that void is going to be filled by an ideology... Hope and faith are so connected. Now, when ideology connects with faith, the ideology becomes an item of faith, not a point of discussion.
I think specifically because of the character that I played, people are very connected to her. I used to get letters from young gay and lesbian and trans-gendered kids saying, 'I didn't kill myself because of Buffy'.
I'm attracted to things that are in direct opposition to something that I've just done. It's not like I'm trying to make the right chess move. It's more just that personal thing where you get connected to something for so long and then you want to do something that's in opposition to that.
'Catch-22' was a huge failure, and it rubbed off on everybody connected to it. I had a bunch of lean years where I had to do things, a lot of which I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about.
