Mia Wasikowska quotes:

Traveling to Russia and Germany and being able to see the world at a young age was really cool for me, and I really liked that.

All the time that I'm acting with an animated character, I'm looking at a tennis ball or sticky tape or an eyeline or a man in a green suit. There's no real environment, just this electric green that's blaring into your brain.

There comes a point in your life when you realize your parents aren't perfect.

With a corset on, you can't breathe properly.

I'd love to go off to college to study photography, art history, humanities.

Dancers are kept in a perpetual state of pre-puberty, and for young girls in particular, that type of pressure breeds insecurities.

I always start a film thinking I know how to do it, then I learn all over again.

I want to just do my job and do it well.

In our world, we have so many ways we can escape with technology, like TV, Facebook, computers, text messaging and all that.

Ballet has really helped me in every acting role. You have to be very disciplined, you have to be able to control your nerves and perform under pressure, and all those things you have to use in acting when you're on film or going for an audition.

I've had a great experience with pretty much everybody I've worked with.

As a teenager I was very anxious. I had a lot of energy and passion that I wanted to channel into creative things, and I always felt like I wasn't achieving enough.

I used to love ballet and I did it really, really intensely. But it came so much about achieving physical perfection, which when I was 14 was a big deal.

Although I'm not particularly troubled myself, I do have a lot of empathy for troubled characters.

Photography, for me, is something I can control fully. It's wholly my own expressions.

Even if you're independent, I think you get lonely.

The jobs I enjoy most are the ones where I never feel like I'm performing. I'm just feeling things.

You have an awareness of your body and how to use it and I think that if you can embody a character physically it's another really useful tool.

When I step back and look at all of these really successful people that I've worked with, one thing I do take away from it is how hard they work and how focused they are.

Often, if I read a story and I'm moved, I have an understanding for a character and I don't really know why.

Ultimately, it's a really brave thing to do what makes you happy as opposed to what the norm, or the social norm is, and that's a very important thing for people to remember, especially young women.

My mom used to have a lot of European cinema playing in the house, so I'd catch bits and pieces of films.

I don't consider myself a starlet or a Hollywood person.

With dance, you learn to channel nerves into energy, excited energy.

When you look at magazines, you feel so inadequate and so small and you feel really imperfect, when you're constantly seeing these images.

I was a bit of a loner as a teenager. I never went to a single social event, because they terrified me.

The wardrobe is always the last piece of the puzzle. When you step into the clothing, that's the final step to figuring out that character.

I love seeing my family.

I really like trying to find the roles that are actually really meaningful to me.

Once you're put out there in the public eye, people feel a certain ownership over you.

Feminism is just about equality, really, and there's so much stuff attached to the word, when it's actually so simple. I don't know why it's always so bogged down.

You never choose the way that you're raised, it's just the way that you were raised, but you do get to a certain age where you're in a position to question the expectations of you and the way that you've been formed by your surroundings.

Popularity is very inconsistent. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. It usually just comes in waves.

I've never been happier to be born in this time than when I was wearing a corset.

I think it's really important for actors to have another creative outlet, or for anyone, really.

I've been honoured to portray such intelligent and sophisticated roles.

I like to do projects that challenge me, and hopefully in turn challenge the audience, or open your eyes to something you're not aware of.

I got the first thing I auditioned for - a guest role on two episodes on 'All Saints,' and I don't think I had ever been that excited.

I like characters who remind me of someone I know.

Acting really suited me because I could connect as an actor to emotion.

As an actor you have to wait for someone to cast you, so you're relying on the business.

Coming from dance, I feel acting is - I'm not going to say easy, because it's not. But the dance world is more hard-core.

Dance has such an intensity to it. You become, in a way, an intense person.

Dance is such a stressful environment.

Director Park always talked to me about her in a very innocent way, that the story was of her coming of age and her sexual awakening and her going from girl to woman and that she had the same desires and hopes as other young people in terms of being very infatuated, which comes in the form of her uncle, which is very unconventional.

Doing an accent removes you from yourself and reminds you, every instant, that you're playing a part.

Everybody is completely different. I think there is no formula for filmmaking. Everybody finds their own way of doing things.

Everybody who is an actor has been acting since they were three.

Fame is useful in certain ways, because it helps you get more roles.

He [directo Park] gave me a sculpture, a jaguar. It is the animal, obviously, and it is in my bedroom at my parents' place at the moment. But I am just about to move into my own place and I shall put it somewhere there. I shall make sure it has good lighting. This will be my first place of my own and I am so excited.

I always collect a bunch of images for every film that I do, that reminds me of an essence of the character, or the time that they live in, or what they're experiencing.

I always thought the piano scene was kind of unique to shoot because we were actually able to film with the playback of the actual song. And that was quite amazing because it almost made it easier - music is usually something that is added after filming has finished so to be able to shoot a scene with music was really wonderful.

I always try and learn as much as I can from different departments on a film set.

I come from a background of independent films.

I definitely have an appreciation for fashion.

I didn't shoot any guns then or when we did the scene with Uncle Charlie [Matthew Goode] and Evie [Nicole Kidman] in the hall. I sort of pressed the button but there were no blanks or anything in there because I think it was always going to cut.

I get restless easily so I always want to keep working, but I am trying to pace it as well.

I hate the feeling when I'm overseas, away from Australia, that I'm trapped, blocked by an ocean from getting to the people I love. That gives me anxiety.

I like my anonymity - that when I meet people they don't know me.

I like to be absorbed in what my character's doing.

I love doing accents because it takes you one step away from yourself and allows you to embody someone else's character.

I read a lot of books. So, usually when I go home I try to re-charge my batteries and absorb new stories to become inspired again.

I really loved it because it really informed his way of seeing my character and the story. If you look closely he always had this metaphor of an egg, of a little chick pecking her way out of a shell, and in one scene in the kitchen there are all these white plates on a wall and then in the middle there is a yellow plate so even that looks like an egg. And a lot of the furniture was almost sculpted in that way as well. It was really cool to see that.

I think that dancing has helped or prepared me, in a number of different ways, for the film industry, especially with controlling your nerves when you walk into an audition because you're on stage from a young age.

I think that I burnt myself out a little bit with my dancing because I did so much of it. I was exhausted so thought that I would try a different kind of performance and expression and acting seemed like a close fit; it was similar in some ways to dancing. My mum showed me some really good films and so I became interested in films and acting.

I wanted to be a dancer from when I was about nine or something like that and started ballet. I used to really like it and got into it and did it full time for a couple of years. I did a lot of ballet but I traded that in for acting when I was about 15.

I would hope everyone would be a feminist.

I'm a huge sucker for comfort.

It was good but it was just a tiny bit uncomfortable because it was a day of lying in the bushes and I think I got a major muscle thing going on there! But it was good. It was fun. That is one of the things you get to do in film that you don't do, or that I don't do, in real life. I can't speak for Dermot [Mulroney]! But it was fun.

It's hard to tell what people realize. Everybody's different and has a different understanding of the difference in times.

It's really rare to get a teenage role that resembles something of what it's like to be a young person, that isn't a cliché or a stereotype.

One of the producers, Wonjo, was an amazing interpreter. I don't think we really knew how it was going to work at the beginning. Yet it was something that a couple of days into it seemed so seamless and it wasn't something that we noticed or thought about. A couple of times I cornered him and forced him to speak English but we didn't speak much English at all. That said, I don't think anything was ever lost in translation. It was all very easy.

Someone once told me to believe 5 percent of what everybody tells you.

The independent films are really where I kind of come from and where I feel comfortable.

The independent films are really where I kind of come from and where I feel comfortable. It's never been about the blockbusters and making a huge tonne of money. It's always been about wanting to do projects about the things that I think are important to be out there.

There's a bunch of directors that I really admire, and Australian ones as well. It would be nice to do a film at home.

To have a creative outlet that you can control is really important because you do a lot of waiting to be cast, then waiting to go into production, and then waiting on set.

We have so many American and English films in Australia that we hear those accents often, so they're not too hard to pick up, but it's always a challenge.

What I like about film is it explores imperfections.

When I got onto set with him we were given a folder of storyboards. I thought that was pretty incredible because I hadn't worked with anybody who used storyboards before so he obviously had a very precise way as to how he visualized the film from the very beginning. It was every scene, but to his credit he was incredibly collaborative and gave us many opportunities to have our own input and to change things with him, so it was a really great way of working.

When you dance intensely, you are really aware of your physicality, and that's always great to have as a tool, when you're an actress.

Yes, a lot of European cinema and a lot of independent films and art-house stuff. She is a photographer. She is a visual artist and photographer and my dad is, too. My mum, I must credit for showing me good films. With my career, my parents were great and though they were a little wary, maybe, of the acting ambitions they have always been supportive.

You are relying on a waiting on other people in acting and films, so to be able to have something that I have full creative control over is really very therapeutic.

You definitely put a bit of yourself in every character, and you always have to have an understanding and empathy for the person that you play.

Director Park asking that if there was a pocket on one side of the piece of clothing then there should be a pocket on the other side. They were a little uncomfortable to wear, yes, because there were a lot of tight, high-waisted things so it was great at the end of the day to slip into some pajamas!