I can't tell you how scary it can be walking onto a movie and suddenly joining this family it's like going to somebody else's Christmas dinner everyone knows everyone and you're there and you're not quite sure what you're supposed to be doing.

It's very important that every movie I do makes money because I want the people that had the faith in me to get their money back.

There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally the movies hide all of that.

I mean I love L.A. - I love living here. But I wish that we could make things without the need to hit a home run every single time. It's a unique thing to Hollywood that if you don't do that every time then you're considered a failure. But it's like 'Well are you making movies to be successful? Or are you making movies to learn something?'

Whether in success or in failure I'm proud of every single movie I've ever directed.

In Torch Song I did that character almost non-stop from 1978 until I made the movie in 1987. Then I had some failure which also colors how you react to doing other things.

I love music and after my first experience with movies I can't wait to do more.

You ask any moviemaker what their favorite movie experience was and they'll say it was one of the first ones where everyone had to pitch in and do everything together and you had to struggle.

If you're working on a movie you want it to be projected on the largest tapestry possible and the sound to be perfect and for that kind of communal experience of the movies to take place for it.

In some movies you feel like you're a very small part of a huge machine. Whereas in the theater you can have a very small part but you can still feel the weight and the gravity of it. Given the nature of theater it's a more concentrated and quiet experience.

The greatest way for people to experience a comedy is to go in not knowing anything about it. But because of marketing it's impossible. Marketing meaning that in order to get people to come you can't just go 'Hey there's a great movie - we're not going to show you anything from it but trust us!'

But in the back of my mind I've always looked to the biggest-scale Hollywood movies. Because to me the most satisfying experience is of watching a movie if it's done really well. And so that aspiration is always it for me if I have the opportunity to do it.

I believe that being an actress or being involved in a movie has to be a life experience otherwise why go for it? I have to change me and I have to learn things and I have to push me and my limits. By acting I find a freedom inside of a prison in a way.

Making movies is a very different experience in a lot of ways. It's difficult when you're used to owning the copyright and having a landlord's possessory rights - I rent my plays to the companies that do them and if I'm upset I can pull the play. But the only two directors I've worked with are pretty great.

Lord of the Rings was my first experience making movies and at the time I had no ideas how movies were done. I thought that's the way they're done so in a way I had nothing to compare it to.

When you go to the movies with your whole family it's a different experience. For some reason it's something that you're all doing together and you take away something special in that.

I'd done table reads for my own screenplays and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts.

Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile.

I think each movie-making process is a very exhausting and satisfying and fulfilling experience for me.

How do people relate to movies now when they're on portable devices or streaming them? It's not as much about going to the movies. That experience has changed.

Very often I've known people who wouldn't say a word to each other but they'd go to see movies together and experience life that way.

Normally I love to go to the movies and when I see a character portrayed by different actors at different ages it kind of pops a little bit for me. It brings me out of the movie experience. Now we have the technology to cure that.

I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who by all laws of logic should never have made it. At each stage of my career I lacked the experience.

Mark Ruffalo aka the Incredible Hulk is the natural gas industry's worst nightmare: a serious committed activist who is determined to use his star power as a superhero in the hottest movie of the moment to draw attention the environmental and public health risks of fracking.