I've had situations where producers would be like, 'Could you meet me? Take the train; don't tell your parents.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I've never let producers tell me what to do. Even when I was making television, I always did what I wanted to do, and if I couldn't, I didn't do it. It was a freedom that, these days, young directors starting out don't have.
My parents met because my father was an actor friend of one of my mom's brothers, but my mother has never set foot on the stage - she's quite shy. So it's a strange thing because people say, 'Oh, coming from acting parents,' when the idea of acting would literally make my mother just want to throw up.
Producers generally don't like me; directors do, generally. Convincing the producers is hard. They can't see the commercial value behind such a face, nor would they get a commercial value, necessarily - and I don't mean that in a good way or a bad way.
It's nice to have my mother as someone I can talk to about acting. My dad's a director, so when he comes to watch me on set, he think it's his set. He's always telling a production assistant, 'Can you get me five donuts?'
My mother told me never explain, never complain. Even as a young actress, I determined I would never give personal interviews, since they made me so uncomfortable.
You know, I had my mother and my father convincing me that he would be going back to Hollywood and he'd be back with the actresses and dating them and that he wasn't serious about me at all. So I had him saying one thing to me and my parents telling me something else.
My parents weren't actors or studio executives.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I figured I'm really going to make an attempt to become a real actor. And when I did that, I thought it was time for me to face my parents and tell them what I did.
When I told my parents, 'I'm going to be an actor,' they screamed and wept and freaked out.
I grew up with my parents in the kitchen discussing the audition my dad had that day or moaning about something or other in the industry, so it was unglamourised and normalised for me from a very young age.