I get up in the morning and I used to be eighteen. I’m not eighteen anymore and ninety per cent of my active life is finished. I always looked young. And suddenly I’m going to be forty-eight. I look at myself in the mirror sometimes and I tell myself, ‘What is this fucking head? Who would have such a face?’ So I understand these kind of feelings. Since I’m not particularly vain, I think of someone who has this sort of vanity, someone who would always have been told that they are what other people see in them. This particularly applies to an actor when you seem to be more than you really are, and nobody really knows you or sees your inside. And I think, ‘That’s a problem worth dealing with.’

The three generations of women were important, because the film really is about women and their points of view as professionals. Here’s an old lady, Joan Blondell, who still has all her life and sexual feelings, which you can see though we don’t go into them; and Gena, who’s a few decades down from Joan; and the young girl, who is really seventeen years old. And these three generations do haunt the waking hours of women: your powers waning, your attractiveness having to be worked on more. I think these are real things, and to put them in terms of this story really gave me fits.