But I was always uncomfortable in that. Physically uncomfortable. Either from the fat suit, or the neck, or my severe dieting. Or wearing the camera.
He's very inventive with his use of the camera, and innovative, so I was doing some creative things I had never done before.
I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I've always wanted to do that. Now I'm thinking, 'Maybe there's a story in Joan of Arc's mother!' If I don't hurry up, her grandmother!
I couldn't kill a chicken, I couldn't kill a cow - I was a vegetarian too at that time - so I thought, well what is there that I could kill? I couldn't kill this and I couldn't kill that.
I did my famous cabbage soup diet, so I was able to do it.
I do like to work with young directors because it's such a difficult business that I think after directors have been around a while sometimes, not always, but sometimes their passion gets siphoned off because they get hurt.
I sketched out a rough story for them and the director said, well it's a good story but we have the go-ahead from Universal to make this script and did I want to do it. I said no, and they left.
I talked to women who lived there, to get their speech patterns and outlook on life - and how narrow that is.
I think that the change began... I made a film a few years ago called The Spitfire Grill, and that didn't make much money either, but it was a good film and an independent film.
I wanted to work on this central problem of killing. How you go about killing. Now, in the film I had to kill my children - well, I didn't want to get that far.
I've lived most of my life in Manhattan, but as close as Brooklyn is to Manhattan, there are people who live there who have been to Manhattan maybe once or twice.
It was about this school teacher who went to Jerusalem and started bleeding from the palms. It just didn't make an awful lot of sense to me.
It's a lot of fun to take the rides and to take part in the bright lights. But it's also nice to go home at night and be quiet.
It's a sin to have your films not to make money.
It's about avoiding reality through various escape routes that become addictions and lead to Hell. My character is addicted to television, chocolate, coffee, to her dream of her son, which has no basis in reality.
It's been awhile. My Oscar is getting kind of tarnished. I looked at it a couple of years ago and thought I really needed a new one.
It's not true at all! I know he says that but I keep telling him that I wish we'd had a tape recorder because he mis-remembers!
Jack Nicholson - I think that's the best thing he's ever done, it has the least Nicholsonian things in it. He really created a character different from himself.
Nobody would want to leave that film to go get high.
She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways for her to not feel her feelings.
She loses 50 pounds in the film, and goes from fairly sane to totally out of her mind. So for the first part of the film I was wearing a 40 pound fat suit, which is very, very uncomfortable. But the worst part was the neck.
So I was at the Actor's Studio, thinking about this, and I happened to glance over to the other side of the stage and I saw the ugliest chair I have ever seen. And I thought, 'Well, I could kill that chair!'
The interesting thing about doing a play is to find a way to make it fresh and do it as though you were doing it for the first time.
Their life is about getting enough money to put food on the table to feed their children, and that's it.
Then in came this script with another very low offer, and another drug addict and a depressing and difficult part to play. I thought, 'Why should I put myself through that for hardly any money?'
They pulled Resurrection out of the theatres, so it was running in New York and I was nominated for the Oscar and there was no ad in the newspapers to say it was running. So it was literally killed.
To me, it's a very moral film. If my son were a teenager now, I would drag him to see it.
Well my taste wasn't very good when I first started out. But later, when I began to appreciate the art of acting, I would say the actress I most admire is Vanessa Redgrave.
What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.
When you've been an actress for 45 years as I have, it's a feast or famine life and I thought that maybe it was time now to have a steady gig!
Ellen played her Academy Award nominated character from 1978's Same Time, Next Year on Broadway first and won a Tony Award for Best Actress in 1975.
Ellen is an ordained minister.
Ellen turned down the lead role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975 due to the fact that her husband was ill and she had to care for him.
Ellen has stated in the book "On Women Turning 50" that she did not attend the 1975 Academy Awards, where she won the Best Actress award for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), because she was certain she would win and could not handle the pressure and attention. After attending several later Oscar ceremonies at which she lost, she regretted not being there to accept her award.
Ellen has one grandchild.
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