You know how it is when you put on your best friend's shirt. You feel weird, even if everyone tells you that it looks good. You know that it isn't right.
Surrounding myself with women of different backgrounds and on different paths and in different stages of their lives has become so valuable to me.
I only write about stuff I know. I don't have a lot of experience with boys and stuff so I write a lot of songs about interesting and strange subjects that people wouldn't write songs about.
It's really hard to see yourself and to recognize that you are a human being like everybody else. You just think everybody's judging you.
Sometimes you pick up on the myth and it's just an accident. I think it comes naturally out of people, and some people are aware of it.
Whenever you want something that you're not going to get, suddenly the whiney 3-year-old comes out in you.
We're in a different time right now, and I think we're ready to see a different type of female hero.
For me, I believe that just seeing women be strong and tough is not answering the question of what a female hero looks like. Women have their own set of skills that are worth exploring and seeing on screen.
It's very scary to allow the world to see you.
Sometimes I laugh with my parents, and sometimes I yell at them, and both are therapeutic.
I know that I'm an actor and I guess I could kind of put on an act, but it takes so much more time to be someone you are not. I feel so much better just being comfortable with myself and hopefully girls will accept that.
I didn't have a regular school experience and wanted a more abstract way of learning. I started exploring in lots of different creative ways. It gave me the opportunity to travel and play music, so it was good for me.
I think that I write about stuff that others don't write about. I don't have a bunch of love songs cuz I don't really have much boy experience. I just write about what I am actually going through in my real life.
I think that usually I'm just drawn to something that's different from something that I've done previously. Whatever makes me feel something. Whatever makes me excited and connected to it.
I started acting in second grade - my first role was in the Thanksgiving play. I was the Indian chasing the turkey. All the other mom's encouraged my mom to get me into acting after that.
I think that, especially as the kids are growing up, they have so much stuff going on in their own lives, they don't really know how much they're looking at their mom as the big problem
I think it starts to feel really redundant when you start to do something the same way over and over again. I don't think it's good to become so dependent on a certain writing process.
I usually get my lyrics when I let my mind wander, when you're not really awake, but not yet fully asleep. I keep an open notebook by my bed and then just write whatever comes to me.
I was listening to a lot of Norwegian black metal and death metal. There's a great history to Norwegian black metal. That music is very dark and violent, but it's also beautiful.
I had a tough time fitting in, as I guess most kids do. I felt like school was kind of a grand opportunity to figure yourself out and to figure out what you wanted.
I was home-schooled, was always very close with my mom and was very straight-laced and square. I was never the rebellious one, and I never threw hissy fits.
I think more things are becoming socially acceptable. I think that just by having more media, whether that's TV or Internet, we're able to see more things.
I'm learning with the older that I get that some feelings are just universal and that I'm not the only one who hates their hair or their life at times.
I think the interesting aspect of life is that you're always sort of in the middle. You're never the youngest and you're never the oldest.
I was the type of person that would show a PowerPoint presentation about why I should do something versus crying and screaming over it.
I have a lot of different influences. Everything from Maroon 5, Gwen Stefani, The Clash, Kanye West - just a lot of different artists.
I'm looking for something to laugh over. After long enough, your body just needs to keep the hydration. You can't keep crying it out.
I was home-schooled 'cause I wanted to be an actor. I would spend all day watching movies, trying to get through calculus.
For me, the dumbest rule is that you can't chew gum in school. For some reason, chewing gum for me gets my brain going.
Clothing totally changes my perception of how I feel about myself depending on what it is that I'm wearing.
I think that fashion is very important for me and I think that it's a wonderful means of self-expression.
I feel like the movie is reminding people of who they are, which is what I think all great art does.
I was 3 when I told my mom that I knew what my dharma was and that I wanted to be an actor.
I'm so used to swimming with the piranhas. And they're really not that bad.
I want more awareness of humanity in this world.
I really love both acting and singing equally.
I didn't go to prom - I was homeschooled.
I would go into periods of depression in my life, and I would feel so alone. I felt that there was no one who understood how I felt, either on TV or in music, and writing really helped me change what I thought and how I felt about myself.
As an actor, I think you can get really bad habits, if you do the same thing, every day. You can get stuck in a rut. So, I like jumping between genres, and then taking a break and learning something new. I like feeling like I'm still learning.
I wasn't interested in going to the school dances. I wasn't interested in going to the football games. What I wanted was to be in my room painting my walls and doing weird stuff. That's what I wanted and I got to do what I wanted, so that, to me, is my high school experience.
I just always loved mythology, ever since I was a kid. Greek mythology was something I remember learning about in fourth grade, and Egypt, too, and something about both those things just clicked with me. I just thought they both were so beautiful and interesting to learn about.
In the past I've been very into the falling part, very into the swimming in the dark, deep emotional water. 'Rampart' I really went into it and it took me three times as long to get out of that depression as it did to just do the scenes. I had to learn to give it my all and then go home and laugh.
I'm sure that there's frustration that comes with wanting to just have a normal mom. But, I don't really know if they see it as any different than any other problem you might have with a parent. I think everybody can think about one thing that their parents used to do, all the time, that would embarrass you.
I try to find some sort of meditative hobby to do on set, and it's different for every film. There's a lot of downtime, but I don't like reading on set because it feels like you're taking yourself out of your world, instead of being present. And then, you feel like you're not ready to do whatever you have to do.
I have always been really picky about the films that I make, because I think that there's such an incredible opportunity to bring up questions when you're making movies, and some of my favorite films bring up big questions. They are movies that, when you walk away from it, it hits you as something deeper, and it's a great, fun way to be able to bounce around some of these harder concepts in our heads.
Singing is an incredible expression and something that is important to me, but where I feel comfortable with how much I reveal about myself is acting. I enjoy the characters, the costumes, the wigs and just being a chameleon.
You have to be really comfortable with yourself because people are going to tell you that you're eyes are too brown or you're this or you're that. And if you're not comfortable with yourself, you could get pretty freaked out.
There's obviously something that feels very good about being with a new filmmaker who's very excited, but I also think there's something very comforting in a director who's been around a few times. Both have their pros and cons.
There is beauty in living in a small space, as a child. Some aspects of it are so beautiful, and it's so nice to not see the darkness. But then, in other ways, there's a whole range of experience that's being missed because of it.
The experience of making a movie, you start to see it everywhere. It's just this amazing mechanism that your brain does because it just so badly wants to be helpful and keep all the information that you need as accessible as possible.
Maybe you're not perfect, but you're willing to actually look at yourself and take some kind of accountability. That's a change. It might not mean that you can turn everything around, but I think there's something incredibly hopeful about that.
It's hard when I get to the end of the movie and am held hostage and am supposed to be very upset and the funniest things I've ever heard in my life are coming out. All I can do is pretend there's something really important behind me to hide my face from it.
Part of accepting a role is being interested in the character and part of it is being interested in the movie or what it means and the exploration of it. But it's more about not knowing the answers to certain questions but wanting to go on the journey of discovery to find the answers.
One of the reasons I love making movies is because it's an opportunity to share with the world a different way of being or a different way of living or seeing the world. If it's something you've already seen before, if I have too many reference points for it, then it's not exciting for me to make.
Lately, I've been getting too much attention with the Met Gala and work going so well that I try to find rejection in my day. I'll seek out someone on the street or at the farmers' market and ask for something where I know they'll say no. No one likes rejection, but it's real. And I don't want to lose that feeling.
When I take on a character, it's a sacrifice. There's something that you give up every time. I want to become these characters, and I want to be mysterious, but if you know too much about me, it's not going to be too much fun watching me play a character, because it's just going to be me with a mask on, instead of you believing what the mask is.
When what you do is play characters, every day, all day, I wasn't really interested in playing a pop star on the weekends. I wanted to be myself, and it slowly turned into not being me at all, so I just didn't really see the point. If the music actually happens, at some point, it will be because some underground following happened, or some little elves heard it and were leaking it.
We need to have points of view from lots of different types of people. People who have different backgrounds, different parts of the world, who maybe perceive gender differently. We're in this time where we have social media, we have the ability to share so much, that I think that we need to create more space and more opportunity for people that are just outside of the typical cliched binary roles.
The main thing for me is just the length of time it takes to make a movie. It's at least a year of just talking about it, talking about it with yourself or your director or your other castmates or the press, so you just want to make sure it's a film that although you initially feel this pull or this drive to it, you don't really have the answers to why you're drawn to it. But it's more about not knowing the answers to certain questions but wanting to go on the journey of discovery to find the answers.
The way that I'm feeling the shift in movie industry is that women are allowed to be part of the development process. So I do feel like things are changing because I'm allowed to option books or write an original screenplay or direct. Those possibilities are really wide open. I think that males still struggle to write for females, which is totally fine because I don't think I could write a really impactful male role because that's not the life that I lived. So we'll just keep shouting and say we need more opportunities for not just women but people that are just different.
