On fighting for strong female roles: “I would get more excited about the stronger parts, and maybe I fought harder to get them… I think for the most part, female power is portrayed in the bedroom.”

On her mother: “I would always hear her whispering in my ear, ‘I’ll kill myself if anything happens to you!’ So, I kind of knew when to say no; when not to continue the party, because I whole-heartedly believed that if anything had happened to me my mom would have killed herself… I still put her through hell. She didn’t know that in my head I knew when to stop. I tell her, ‘My God, it could have been so much worse!’”

,br>
On coping with bullies: “I knew it was so temporary. School is going to disappear, and there’s a whole future out there.”

On being the kind of person whom adversity has honed, rather than crushed: “We’re definitely fighters,” she says. “My mom and I are survivors. We came to America with nothing, and built everything from the ground up.” She describes her mother as strict and her childhood as shaped by discipline and hard work. “I wasn’t raised just to be a pretty girl, or somebody’s wife.”

On her director marriage patterns: “It kind of seems typical,” she says of the marital pattern, “but there’s no one else that you talk with as much as the director. If you’re going to fall in love, it’s hard for it not to happen with that person—the one you’re spending the most time with, and having the most interesting conversations. I think it would have been challenging for me to have made the movies and had a boyfriend that wasn’t working on the film too, because you get so into it. Everything else disappears except the project. And this has been a decade!”

On her husband Paul Anderson: “He’s amazing that way,” … “He’ll have done this really cute little envelope, and inside are pictures of where we’re going and our itinerary and what to expect from the hotel.”

On her daughter: “I definitely want to keep [Ever] as dependant as any young girl her age—which is relative, but I have a picture in my head of what that should be.”

+ 2 Flare shoots

And two behind the scene