Quotes

[Upon being asked about the Leonard Cohen video, for First We Take Manhattan, in which she played "The Woman on the Train"] There was the blessing of making it on sumptuous black and white film, along with the lighting, which was sublime ... and all of these elements together helped to create that luminous enchantment ... that rapturous illumination one treasures in movies of the Golden Age ...

Upon being asked about her scenes in the Leonard Cohen video for First We Take Manhattan] The first began with a man taking his suitcase in hand, and then pausing to look at me and touch me softly. I was asked to do a take with a completely blank expression on my face. This reminded me of a story I had heard about a director asking Greta Garbo, for the final scene of their movie, to make her face 'a blank sheet of paper ...' so the audience could write their own ending ...

[on working with Leonard Cohen After we finished, I exited the train and saw the exquisite Leonard Cohen standing on the platform, waiting for me. How sweet life can be. How tender ... He thanked me for being in his music video, and we left the station to have dinner with some of the others at a heavenly little place by the sea. Looking back, I realize, that may have been at midnight or even one o'clock in the morning! But it was France ... And it was beautiful ... And it was magical ...

[on acting] For me being an actress was a spiritual calling, which I was virtually consumed by as a very small child. I experienced this as a kind of pulsating, radiating, all-encompassing fire within me ... This had to do with touching and moving people spiritually, and potentially helping them to liberate wounds deep within, that were crying out to be expressed and transformed ... I knew that the spiritual fire that threatened to consume me, could be an offering ... a blessing ...

[on retreating from her modelling career] ... after several rather intense years of being so widely photographed, I found, accelerating within me, a visceral hunger for retreat. I had entered a time during which I could not bear to have pictures of me taken on such a scale.

[on turning down certain roles] If someone incarnates to touch the world as a violinist, they are not expected to perform without clothes. But during that time in movies, it seemed to be almost taken for granted by many that, as an actress, with a certain look, I should. I refused.

[on her writing] There, from my new sanctuary, I continued with a spiritual practice I had engaged in passionately since I was a little girl. I wrote. Whether with a pen on paper, or upon a ghostly parchment in my mind—as though I were taking dictation from an aching, ancient part of myself—I wrote. I wrote and I wrote, and I did not stop writing. Poetry.