The actors I respect are the ones who see it as a career and manage to live reasonably normal lives, like Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
I've always thought of the project as a sort of sexually driven digestive system, that it was a consumer and a producer of matter. And it is desire driven, rather than driven by hunger or anything like that.
Everybody will make mistakes, and for some that mistake will rise to the level of being a crime.

