Jennifer Jason Leigh

There's a lot of magic involved in movies that as a child I really appreciated. So I love bringing my son to set. It reminds me of what I loved doing as a child, and also, as an actor, you have a lot of down time.

I love Polaroids and I have a Polaroid camera collection from the '50s.

I'd love to have children, and I think marriage is great, I really do.

I like to investigate all different kinds of people, I guess, and find out what makes them who they are, and try to be honest in the portrayal, and truthful, and find out how to understand that person, how to communicate that person's experience.

I'm a fraidy cat. I play everything very safe in my life, so I think that's why I like characters that don't.

I really go against drama in my life. Life is too short.

On film, I'm very mysterious, but in life I'm very dull.

I'm so different to the roles I play, and perhaps that's why they are appealing to me as an actor. But I would never want to inhabit my characters' shoes in real life.

My mom's a screenwriter, and before that, she was an actress, and my father was an actor; my stepfather was a director, so I was on sets a lot as a kid. I loved the magic of the set. You walk in, and it's a living room, and you walk outside, and it's just a piece of wood held up by another piece of wood.

You know, you really do choose your existence in a way.

My mother always helped me because she was kind of a research fanatic. When she would write a screenplay, there would be so much research all over the walls. And so when I started working as an actress, I would do the same thing. She instilled in me a love of taking everything very seriously. It didn't matter what it was.

I love acting, but I am a mom, and the roles just weren't coming because of a mixture of things: because I'm not ambitious, and because I'm older, and I had a baby. I really felt like I had said a graceful and completely happy goodbye to acting in a significant way. And I had sort of made my peace with that.