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I always love to learn new things. That's the reason I like being an actor.

So anyway, I've learned a lot about myself just in terms of acting but just work ethic and interesting things like full-page monologues or talking straight into camera, which I had never gotten to do before.

As an actor, I still don't really know exactly what I am doing most of the time.

But most of what I've learned about acting - and a lot of what I've learned about life in the past seven years - was taught to me by Robert Altman.

Everything I learned as an actor, I have basically applied to writing.

In my long and difficult and mature life, I have come to learn that the less I know about acting and the more I know about everything else, the better I'll be at both acting and living.

I started to study, because I knew I had to learn a lot about myself as an actor; you can't act the same as you did as a child.

As an actor, I've grown considerably. For example, it's taken me years to get comfortable doing a romantic scene and dancing on stage in front of a live audience. I do it a lot better than I ever did. I've really opened up a lot. And I'm glad I have because I'm being appreciated for it.

I've always used my own personal emotions and things that I've gone through in my life to build a character. The work that I do before a film feels almost like therapy, between me and whoever I'm playing.

It's my deepest interest as an actor: I love discovering how human beings work, how their flaws reveal themselves - how to learn and grow from that - and how characters teach me things as a woman and as a parent.