Valeria Golino

“I love acting. I've been doing it since I was 16, and it's in my nature. It's the thing I do best. But as much as I love acting, I love cinema more. I always had a thing about creating images.”

“There's no big splashy renaissance in Italian films. We have good young actors and directors. What we lack are screenwriters. It's hard to write about Italy.”

“As an actress you can participate, you can be a co-author, help the director. But I always wanted to be able to make the big decisions.”

“I can touch my toes, but I bend in a strange way. I'll never be in the Olympics.”

“I've learned so many things from directors in my acting career. There are even some things I've learned that I didn't want to do. There are those directors who've really made me shine and others who've made me opaque.”

“I worked with fantastic actors, fantastic directors. People I would never otherwise have met. Was I limited? Yes. Did I use it as I could have? No. But I was always ambivalent about Hollywood and what I wanted. And ambivalence in our business is no good for success.”

“'Miele' is a code name for a girl who has a double life.”

“I think that it helps that I have acted. That said, it doesn't mean you're going to be a good director.”

“I came to Hollywood and I loved it. It was a great time, but in my head I was still elsewhere, in Europe. I believed in a certain cinema, which I still do believe in - a certain European cinema - and as a young woman being in America, I thought I was being taken away from that.”

“What I am really curious about is the visuals of cinema... the form.”

“When I think of Italy now, I think of accessories, possessions, bad TV, fake boobs, BMWs.”