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"Acting shouldn't just be about the glorification of one's buttocks or one's face," Davis told celebrity interviewer and good friend Stanley Tucci for Interview magazine.
Since then, she seems to have made a point of avoiding empty gestures that would transform her into a sex symbol kind of movie star. Instead, she has set out to be an actor, for the long haul. "Hopefully," she says now, "you can have a nice long career if you do all different kinds of parts, right?"
Right -- so Davis impressed audiences and critics last year as Jack Nicholson's feisty daughter in About Schmidt.
Totally transformed by a severe black wig, she now appears as Harvey Pekar's eccentric wife, Joyce Brabner, in American Splendor. Paul Giamatti plays underground comic book creator Pekar in scenes with Davis. Then, in a strange twist, both Pekar and Brabner also play themselves in the film, sometimes in overlapping scenes.
"Everybody is just looking for a good script," Davis says of her recent acting choices. She is referring to About Schmidt, American Splendor and Alan Rudolph's upcoming drama The Secret Lives Of Dentists, in which she appears with her real-life actor husband, Jon Patrick Walker.
"People are looking for something that is interesting and says something," Davis says. "These are the scripts that have come my way and have directors attached that I can have lunch with and have a good time with and get along with. But I know they're not conventional roles."
In the case of About Schmidt, director Alexander Payne gave her an excellent support role to play and Nicholson gave her a wonderfully comfortable working relationship.
"A huge movie star like him really has the power to make the experience either totally intimidating -- where you're quaking in your boots -- or a real acting experience. And he really makes a huge effort to disarm people that he's working with," Davis says of Nicholson.
"He came on set in his bathrobe with his hair all standing up and he put his arms around me and gave me a huge squeeze and called me, 'Hopey,' which only my father and mother and sisters call me. He made me feel very comfortable. He is a very generous person. And it was really nice to see -- it was inspiring to see -- how much he still really loves and relishes doing what he does. It was also really exciting to be with someone who is really kind of a genius at it, you know."
On the set of American Splendor, a quasi documentary with dramatic parts, things were different. But that was because co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini juxtaposed the scenes where Giamatti and Davis acted with the scenes of Pekar and Brabner for real. Having Brabner on set freaked Davis out.
"She made me very, very self-conscious," Davis says. "When you're playing someone who's alive and standing next to the camera you feel doubly and triply self-conscious," says Davis, "and you're not going to be good if you're wondering whether what you're doing is something that they would be doing.
"I wanted her to be happy with what I was doing (but) I couldn't concentrate with her there." So Davis asked the filmmakers to ban Brabner from the set when Davis was acting.
"I know she was bummed about that," Davis says with a shrug. Now, with the success of the film at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, all is forgiven. "We got over it."