Holly Hunter
I got a horror film, 'The Burning,' and suddenly I was making crazy money, like a thousand a week, so I moved into an apartment on Amsterdam with a guy who was also in 'The Burning,' Jason Alexander.Collection: Money
I moved to the city in August of 1980, and someone I thought was a friend had an apartment in this wedding cake of a building, so I slept on her couch for a few days.Collection: Wedding
I don't want to cancel the South out in my life. I carry my Southernness with me. God knows, it's a great place to come from. It's also a place I had to get away from. It is just an endless world for me, so much culture and eccentricity.
Privacy is paradise.
I heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once. And you know, tennis, it's not a good place for that.
I'm not religious. I'm not an atheist. Would I say I'm an agnostic? Possibly. But I would say the collective unconscious is something I'm much more interested in.
I was born and raised on a farm, where boys had chores and girls did not, i.e., drive tractors, bale hay, take care of cattle.
My sister took me as her own. My mum had a lot of help raising me. That's what happens in large families: your siblings raise you.
So much European cinema has open arms to stories carried by women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. And America is a little behind in that.
In many parts, I start from the outside and then it triggers things within. For 'The Piano,' I went, 'I'm going to learn these piano pieces. I'm going to learn this sign language, and I'm going to do them all day every day, five days a week.' It was a totally physical thing.
New Yorkers have an intimacy with Trump, man. I mean, for decades.
I love wearing wigs because they're instantly transformational.
I love to look at physically beautiful people, and obviously others do, too. But there's such a narrow definition of what that is; the people who are my friends in life, the more I get to know them over the years, the more beautiful they are to me.
I guess I'm more of a direct person than an indirect one.
I always had an acting crush on Philip Seymour Hoffman. He just wowed me all the time. He was just quietly so impressive and so private.
I've moved laterally, as opposed to vertically. I was never a superstar. I've always had to move between a couple of years of unemployment, where offers are not provocative enough to take, and seasons where I work nonstop for a year.
I can very much enjoy taking a year off. Whereas some people would feel crippled by that, I can feel enlarged by it. And then I also like to work nonstop, maybe for a year-and-a-half, and then take a year off.
I'm not a classically beautiful person, but hopefully it increases my longevity as an actress that my career isn't dependent on my great, great good looks.
I've never directed, but it must be humbling.
I like to do research. It gives me a sense of ownership. That's very powerful for me as an actor to just own it.
I get cold really quickly, but I don't care. I like weather. I never understand why people move someplace so that they can avoid weather.
The rhythm of my career has always been very static, staccato and then silent, and then a lot of work, and then none.
I've never had a career of that kind of box office power. I've always learned the hard way.
I really admire people who are extraordinarily tolerant and patient.
I've never worked as much as I would've wanted to, and that's why I end up doing a lot of stage as well, because stage is a full course meal.
More and more movies have been pressured to allow reporters and TV cameras to come onto the set while you're working, and I find that a real violation.
I would love to work more - I really would - but there is not a lot of stuff around and the stuff that is around is not very complicated; it tends to lie a little flat.
I act probably a lot more than you see. I happen to choose movies that don't have much of a life, or I choose movies that are shown on cable instead of as features.
I think it's really odd, too, that the public is so privy to how much money the actors make and what movies cost. It seems to me to be beside the point. When I go to a movie I really don't want to think about the money. I want to see the story.
It's the same with people knowing absolutely everything there is to know about an actor. I actually think the more personal information you have about an actor, the more you have to carve out for yourself when you go to a movie and see them in it.
Mothers and daughters can stay very connected during teenage years. In the middle of your life, you can become very alone. Even though you're connected deeply to other family members, lovers, husbands, friends.
I don't offer advice to actors only because I've seen actors become successful through ways that would never even occur to me or that wouldn't work for me.
I've enjoyed the process of understanding who I am through my work and who I am in relation to others: the intense collaboration that acting requires and thrives in.
There's no way that anyone can know the ebb and flow of one's career. You can't know that. You can tell young actors it's going to be very difficult, but there's no way you can understand the difficulties and the rewards through description. You have to cellularly experience it.
I am a huge fan of Cronenberg, all his movies.
Man, I would have loved to have been fully cognisant of the power of Janis Joplin. I would have loved to have been part of the revolution.
I object to the actual phrase 'Follow me.' You've gotta be kidding! Why would I want to follow anybody else? Nor do I want them to follow me. The machinations of my life, the banalities - they're mine. They belong to me.
I reveal all of myself. I bring all of myself to my roles. You only see me. You don't see anything else but me. That is who's there. They're manifestations of my own self.
I never thought about moving to L.A.; I always wanted to be in New York. I moved there, and now I still have a kind of love affair with the city.
Most of the time I live a fully anonymous life, which is the way I like it.
It's considered a coup to become a lead on a kind of cutting-edge television series. I mean, that's a plus for your feature film career and for your career in general. There are no walls anymore between the two.
What's great about cable is that the ceiling of expectation is lowered because fewer people have to tune in for it to be a success. You don't need 23 million people a week like you do in broadcast.
For every movie that you go see, how many leading male roles are there in any given movie, and how many leading female roles are there? There may be 5 or 6 really good roles for guys and maybe one for a woman. And it doesn't even matter if you're 25. That's just the logistics.
My career has never really been a vertical kind of thing. I mean, it's always been a bit difficult for me.
I remember that when I was in my 30s, a hot age for an actress, lots of offers were coming in, but nothing was great, and I didn't work for 18 months. It was at a really fruitful age, and I wanted to work. There was nothing coming down the pipeline that I thought was good - and then I got 'The Piano.'
I'm a leading lady character actor; I don't fit in one slot simply. I've always been used to a certain amount of struggle, and that prepared me wonderfully for a mature age.
Sometimes it's very difficult to do a movie that's good and then have that movie make it to the light of day.
Sometimes I take a movie that I know is not great; it's not great on the page, but I need to work. Sometimes I need to make the money. I need dough. I want to work, and so I'll take something that is compromised in some arena. But it's like, actors gotta act.
The unknown makes people uncomfortable.
I believe that there is good. I believe there is evil. Do I believe that they come from God who is watching us conduct myriad never-ending wars and looks benignly on because there's higher purpose to all of this? I don't think so.