What's your favorite part of the city?
East Berlin is the coolest place to live. It's beautiful. The best restaurants are there, the best shops, art galleries. People are walking in the streets. There is all this new, new architecture that was brought into East Germany because they dumped so much money into it. It was just so amazing to see the transformation of all those years. You have this really old architecture, but there are sites that are bombed out and what they were able to do is, you have two pieces of really old architecture, and you're able to put a modern structure right in the middle, because it was bombed out. There is no place in Europe where you can do that. In Paris, you'd never be able to because of the codes.

What about West Berlin?
We shot Flightplan all over the place, but one of our locations was Charlottenburg, which is a really pretty part of West Berlin - really cool shops, beautiful old apartment buildings with hardwood floors and high ceilings, good little restaurants. Holger Maschke is a shop right next to where we spent all this time. It only sells coffee things. Every different coffeemaker you could ever imagine in the world, they sell it. Every kind of coffee.

You left Hollywood to go to college. Where in ­Berlin do you continue your education?
I said, "Well, I'll go to the Jewish Museum [designed by architect Daniel Libeskind] for a couple of hours, then I'll go shopping for a couple of hours, and then I'll go to work." I was at the Jewish Museum for four and a half hours. At the Jewish Museum, you have the feeling of being put on a train and being shipped away to a camp. So the way the building is designed, you have these long, long, long, long corridors that are almost like a train station. Then you see these stories of the families. Then you get to the end of this corridor, and you walk into a room, and they only let in five people at a time. This room is completely dark. There's not any light. It's all concrete, and at the top, there are two slits, and you can hear Berlin beyond, but you can't see it. It's sort of like being in a train. You'll hear fire engines going by and things happening, but you're completely blocked out of it.