On Not Being Able to Drive in Films:
Kate Beckinsale: "I did have to on this one actually say, 'You do know I don’t know how to drive, don’t you?' And everyone goes, 'Ha, ha, ha,' you know, and thinks it’s a joke. And I said, 'You know, I really don’t know how to drive and I’m not insured and you can't let me drive.' And they go, 'Sh-t, now we've got to find money in the budget for one of those things to pull you along.' 'I'm terribly sorry. I won't eat anything,' you know? So yes, it’s become much more embarrassing as well as I've got older, yes."
On Taking the Leap to Signing Up with a Driving School:
Kate Beckinsale: "I did get to the point. I did a couple of years ago have a bit in the summer when I wasn’t working and Lily was in camp and I thought, 'Okay, I’ll do it now.' And I got that book, terribly dull book about how to park up a hill with your wheels and things like that. I studied that and went off to the DMV for a written test and was quite confident about the written test until it got to…because I don't drink actually, not because I’m an alcoholic, I just don’t really like it. And they started saying how much alcohol is appropriate? Is it 0.13, 0.28 or…? I don’t know. I just thought, 'I’m never going to probably drink so it’s not really an issue.' So I failed the written test and felt really stupid about that, so that put me off. And so I'm still licking my wounds from failing that test and I’ll have to go again. I did find it very irritating that it was on the point percentage of alcohol."
"I'm never going to know how much is this .1 percent. It’s just if I don’t have it, it’s not an issue. Do you know what I mean? That's what I thought."
On Upcoming Projects:
Kate Beckinsale: "Whiteout has to come out. Winged Creatures has to come out. I did Everybody’s Fine. I just finished that with Robert De Niro and Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore. And then everything will be out."
"In Winged Creatures I play a trailer park single mother who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and is harming her baby for attention. And in Everybody’s Fine I play Robert De Niro’s daughter who’s got her own advertising company and several secrets in the family. So it’s a sort of, it's a story all about sort of various secrets in families. So, lots of different things."
On Working with Robert De Niro:
Kate Beckinsale: "Oh it was great. It was amazing. I mean I’d come across him before years and years ago when I just had Lily and he was putting together a reading of The Good Shepherd, literally like 10 years ago. And I suddenly had a panic phone call the night before saying somebody quite important has dropped out of this reading. I was in New York because Michael [Sheen] was doing Amadeus and I sort of had no nanny or anything. They said, 'Can you do three different accents by tomorrow? Can you do German, Brooklyn and Russian, and go and do this reading with Robert De Niro?' I thought, 'Oh god, okay but I don’t know what I'm going to do with my baby because I haven't got a nanny.'"
"So my friend was the hostess at the restaurant in the village and I managed to say, 'Could you basically hostess whilst holding Lily for an hour and a half while I go and do this?' And she said, 'All right, I will,' so that was sorted. And so I figured out the accents and showed up and De Niro said, 'Yeah, I’m going to invite a few friends.' I got there and the friends were like Marty Scorsese and Chazz Palminteri. And I thought, 'F--k, I've got this Brooklyn accent to do and all these people from Goodfellas are sitting here. This is terrible,' and it was the last scene of the movie. So I managed to get through the Russian one fine and Robert De Niro was very pleased and then the German and all that, and I was sweating, 'Oh my god, I know I'm from Chiswick, West London. I've got no business being here doing a Brooklyn accent in front of Martin Scorsese. I just want to die.' And in the end it actually went okay and they were very nice about it, but it was one of the more hair-raising sort of lack of preparation shocking moments in my life, and then I went and did this movie. I think he’d entirely forgotten about that or certainly didn’t mention it."
