Money was tight and Mum used to do two jobs to support us.

I never felt hard done by and never wanted for anything, but I grew up in a wealthy area where I saw people being handed things on a plate. So it made me want to earn some money and be able to buy things for myself.

I just want to do something risque for my debut, purely because I didn't want to make an entrance being the pretty, sweet type that I've been seen as for the last 3 years.

Well the press and things like that are pretty hard core, but I don't pay too much attention to that.

U.N.-orchestrated gatherings are typically the death of all spontaneity and innovation.

Family is so central to Afghan life that all Afghan stories are family stories. Family is something I simply can't resist because all the great themes of human life - duty, grief, sacrifice, love, envy - you find all those things within families.

My children can't see many of the films that I've been in because I'm always either dying or taking my clothes off.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.