I don’t like sympathy, I like empathy. Sympathy to me is not natural behavior. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people to have sympathy for other people. I never expected people to have sympathy for Aileen Wuornos [in Monster] or for Mavis [in Young Adult]. And I don’t aim for that. I just aim for understanding: If you can understand her, you might hate her, but if you can understand her, then I’ve done my job. That’s all I care about. I think sympathy is more like, ‘I feel sorry for you.’ I don’t want my character to be a victim. We have innately bad human behaviors that sometimes we can explain and justify. It’s easy to say someone’s an asshole because they had this, this and this happen to them, so we have to forgive them. But what if someone was just an asshole? That’s interesting to me.

She just turned 21. She’s a child. When I think about myself at 21, I had just done The Devil’s Advocate, and Keanu [Reeves] had paparazzi following him and Al Pacino said this thing to me: ‘If I knew that my life would be under this kind of scrutiny, I would have never become an actor.’  And I thought, Wow. I couldn’t comprehend it.

And Kristen is just living this to the max and still has a sense of humor about it. There’s this really lovely quality about her that just doesn’t give a fuck. A lot of people say they don’t, but then they go home and cry and pop a Xanax. Kristen actually doesn’t give a fuck. That’s what’s so refreshing about her.

I’m looking forward to killing her and taking her beauty. That’s what happens, right?