Karen Allen: If you just work on your upper body, you're not going to...

I've never done anything for money. My first love is things of limited commercial appeal. I could be happy doing Shakespeare for the rest of my life.

Karen Allen

first-love done love-is

I'm about as healthy as a person can be. I quit smoking seven or eight years ago.

Karen Allen

eight smoking years

Sometimes I think candor is the only kindness.

Karen Allen

truth kindness reality

Eventually you love people - friends or lovers - because of their flaws.

Karen Allen

flaws lovers people

I've always done things the hard way. I was born like a piece of tangled yarn. The job is trying to untangle it, and I'll probably go on doing it for the rest of my life.

Karen Allen

yarn tangled jobs

There's something so wonderful about being an actor in New York.

Karen Allen

actors new-york wonderful

The secrecy thing has gotten to be more and more prevalent in films, and maybe that's good. It's nice to go see a film and not know anything about it. Sometimes I feel like we know too much about films.

Karen Allen

too-much nice sometimes

If there are no other wonderful roles that come my way, I have a quite an interesting, dynamic life.

Karen Allen

roles way interesting

I was always drawn toward the Actor's Studio. I studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute when I first came to New York. One of my favorite teachers was one of Al [Pachino]'s teachers, a guy named Charlie Laughton, who was just a wonderful, wonderful man.

Karen Allen

new-york teacher men

I feel as though I would be delighted to come back into working in the film world, and working in the theater world again. I'm just gonna see what happens.

Karen Allen

film would-be world

You know, I don't really understand a suburban environment. I want to be out in the woods, I want to be where it's wild, I want to wake up and hear birds, I want to walk outside and see a gaggle of turkeys bouncing across my lawn - I want to be someplace like that - or I want to be right in the middle of an urban environment.

Karen Allen

turkeys wake-up bird

I was quite eager to work, anytime somebody was offering me a job, if I liked the role. Because I was always very discriminating from the very beginning, in the sense that I had absolutely no problem saying no to jobs when they came along if somehow they didn't fit into my universe - whatever that was.

Karen Allen

roles offering jobs

I have to say from an actor's perspective, to work with a director who has been an actor through most of their career is a pleasure. They generally have a very deep understanding of the process of what you're doing, of how you are building and exploring the character.

Karen Allen

deep-understanding careers character

I'm always surprised when people say, "Oh, it got such mixed reviews." I guess I didn't read them.

Karen Allen

reviews people

CGI is to me like watching a cartoon. It can be effective, if it's done well. A lot of times you don't feel any real risk. You're watching a bunch of computer-generated graphics.

Karen Allen

risk cartoon real

When I was in my 20s and 30s, there was such a variety and diversity of types of films that you could see. So many of them were really more about the human condition and about relationships between people, and they were smaller films that had a much greater impact on me as a human being.

Karen Allen

diversity impact people

When independent films break through and actually make it into any level of mainstream-ness or get seen by people or find a life actually in theaters, it's extraordinary. And it doesn't happen that often.

Karen Allen

break-through independent people

I watch many, many, many independent films every year that you see once in a film festival and they're never heard of ever again. Many of them are very, very good.

Karen Allen

independent watches years

I think it's very important that films like Bad Hurt don't get lost in the mix of the sci-fi-kill-everything-on-the-screen-blood-dripping-down-the-walls sort of the world of the cinema that we live in.

Karen Allen

wall hurt thinking

I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we're telling, how do we want to tell it?

Karen Allen

real people thinking

If you just work on your upper body, you're not going to be a full-range dancer or performer. You've got to work in all directions as much as you possibly can.