Natalie Portman cares about the quality of her films, not what she can win for them.
Although we've known her as an actress for quite sometime, Portman is making her directorial debut at the Cannes Film Festival later this month. She has adapted and directed a feature film based on Amos Oz' memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. It tells the story of the author's childhood at the end of the British mandate for Palestine and the early years of the state of Israel.
But after winning an Oscar for her dark role in Black Swan, the Israeli actress tells The Hollywood Reporter that she doesn't even think about the famous gold statue.
"I don't know where it is," she answers when asked if she keeps it in Paris. "I think it's in the safe or something. I don't know. I haven't seen it in a while...I was reading the story of Abraham to my child [Aleph] and talking about, like, not worshipping false idols. And this is literally like gold men. This is literally worshipping gold idols—if you worship it. That's why it's not displayed on the wall. It's a false idol."
Even though she doesn't take the gold statue too seriously, she tells the magazine that she definitely won't give up acting anytime soon, even though she and her family live in Paris now. "I don't think I'll stop unless I'm made to by lack of opportunity," she explains.
If anything, moving to Paris has made it easier to teach her 3-year-old about the arts, including film. "I love that my kid wants to go to art museums after school—like, 'Take me to the Pompidou.' I love that it's also not elitist, as it is in New York," she says.
"You can afford to go to the philharmonic or the opera much more easily because all of it's subsidized. And there's a huge culture of cinema there."
But that doesn't mean she doesn't sometimes find herself torn about the French city's culture. "I've been to Paris so much in my life that I felt [at first] like it's very similar, and then when you live in a place, you start realizing how culturally different we are, deeply culturally different," she says.
"I feel like this country has a lot of religion and a lot of freedom around that; and there, the religion is almost like love. Love and intellectualism is their sort of way."
Still, she adds that she wouldn't change it for the world. "I like being a stranger in a place. You're kind of an outsider, and I think that's what makes you. It's the only way I've ever known," she says.