Not only were we practicing, we were nervous rehearsing, because he would sit in a chair with a belt in his hand, and if you didn't do it the right way, he would tear you up. Really get you...We were terrified of him. So terrified, I can't tell you. I don't think he realized how scared...scared...I mean SCARED. So scared that I would regurgitate. (with emphasis) Mmm-hmm. (reporter asks Michael what caused the reaction) His presence, just seeing him...And I was so fast, he wouldn't catch me half the time, but when he did, oh my God, it was bad.

I have to let him know that he's potentially destroying his movie, that he could be making a terrible, terrible error. I needed to let him know that I didn't know or think that I was capable of doing this.

In the 90's action pictures were all the rage. As a woman, I was fed up with them and I initially thought that the script was just another action film dressed up as a period piece. When Michael began speaking about the character's inner life, it was clear that his own inner life was strong, as well. I then saw Cora in a completely different light because of Michael's orientation. It became easy to personalize her.

On the change of the original version of La Passione (1996) by Warner Vision: ...they thought it was a great idea and we started - and more and more people were turning up and I didn’t know who the fuck they were. ‘Oh, that’s Arty somebody, he’s from Warner Vision, he’s flown over from…’ and they’re all yapping away and none of them could get their heads round the idea that it wasn’t meant to be a story. [...] Anyway, egos went all over the place and I lost complete control of it and what I intended it to be hardly went in to the terrible, boring film. And the other thing that really hurt was I did three tracks - which sadly we lost - where, if something mischievous happened, the original idea was to bring in the slide guitar that would start playing a Count Basie routine. All that never happened, it was a shame. [...] They didn’t understand at all, especially the Americans, I mean… I got permission at Ferrari to have their place for a day and there was no film stock left - and I think that sums up the project.

And George Michael really didn’t want to know. I nagged at him because I was worried and because mutual friends kept contacting me, asking if I could do something. He wrote an open letter to Heat magazine, most of which was concerned with telling me, at considerable length, to fuck off and mind my own business

During one scene, I had to do a shooting drill. He put a psychological spin on it.

In the last two years there was a brief period that he decided to quit the films as it is affecting his personal life in many ways.

[About Mirror] I had the greatest difficulty in explaining to people that there is no hidden, coded meaning in the film, nothing beyond the desire to tell the truth. Often my assurances provoked incredulity and even disappointment. Some people evidently wanted more: they needed arcane symbols, secret meanings. They were not accustomed to the poetics of the cinema image. And I was disappointed in my turn. Such was the reaction of the opposition party in the audience; as for my own colleagues, they launched a bitter attack on me, accusing me of immodesty, of wanting to make a film about myself.

…He had always known the situation was fucked up, but it took me calling him out. I told him: ‘I’ve been pissed at you. This was terrible and it hurt me and what you did was wrong’…[he did it] because he was afraid, because he was working on a script with these guys. It was bros before hoes.

The better I got, the greater the pressure and the tougher his feedback would get.

I'm no stranger to the physical aspects of the job doing the whole action-movie thing. But the mental aspect, it really beat me up and it took a long time for me to recover afterwards, to sort of get back to reality.

He went out of his way to deceptively edit an interview and got caught. That is a big story, isn’t it?