Total eclipse of her part

Judy Berlin is a low-budget film, set in a small town in Long Island on the day of a solar eclipse.

I have known the director Eric Mendelsohn for 20 years, and he asked me to read this screenplay he'd written. I was moved by it - and shocked and thrilled when he asked me to play the role of Judy Berlin, who's a young actress dreaming of stardom.

The film is smart and risky, gentle and subtle. So much is left to the imagination, unlike most scripts these days, which are so formulaic. What I loved about it was the way it represented the small things that happen to people - that's where most of real life takes place and that's the stuff that interests me as an actress.

My character Judy is naive and hopeful, qualities I used to have in greater abundance when I was younger. She has this blind confidence about herself and her place in the world. People will judge her, but that usually says more about them than her.

It was great working with friends. Normally when you start on a movie set, you have to find out who's the person with the authority, who you have to ask questions of. There was no need for that on Judy Berlin. We just got down to the work.

At one point I was shooting a scene with Barbara Barrie behind a school. At the end of the take, I noticed that the assistant director was wiping tears from her eyes. I thought, "What could be better than this person being able to step out of her job enough to watch and be moved by the scene?" It doesn't matter what this film does at the box office. What happened there is the reason I wake up every morning to go to work.