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RB: As a working mother, how do you balance the two? It's a struggle that so many women deal with on a day-to-day basis. How do you resolve that?

MG: I don't resolve it, and I have not perfected it at all or even come close. I drop the ball all the time. I'm constantly thinking about it and how it can be managed better, and I'm constantly making what I think are mistakes, but I don't know how else to do it other than to really think it through and do my best. Mistakes are being made all the time, I'm sure. It's really hard to do. Crazy Heart is actually in a lot of ways about the sacrifices you make for your children, at least from Jean's point of view. Until really recently, even though women had been working and having kids for a long time, I think it felt like something that could have been taken away from us. Certainly in the '80s, when I was growing up, it seemed like something you had to act like you were doing perfectly or else maybe you couldn't keep your career. But now it's so much more solidly in place—I mean, of course women can work and have kids—that I think people are starting to expose a little more than they did before how hard it is and how you do fail a little at both things when you're trying to juggle. That's what another one of my movies, Nanny McPhee, is really about. I'm the heroine, I'm a good guy in the movie, but I'm a mother who's not always functioning very well. You have to learn as you go. I don't see how else you do it, because how can you possible prepare, other than learning as you go, to be a mother?

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