Instruments fascinate me because they're completely awkward. When I picked up a guitar for the first time I was like, "What is this?" because it's so foreign and unknown.

It's hard when I get to the end of the movie and am held hostage and am supposed to be very upset and the funniest things I've ever heard in my life are coming out. All I can do is pretend there's something really important behind me to hide my face from it.

I have a lot of different influences. Everything from Maroon 5, Gwen Stefani, The Clash, Kanye West - just a lot of different artists.

I was home-schooled 'cause I wanted to be an actor. I would spend all day watching movies, trying to get through calculus.

I have always been really picky about the films that I make, because I think that there's such an incredible opportunity to bring up questions when you're making movies, and some of my favorite films bring up big questions. They are movies that, when you walk away from it, it hits you as something deeper, and it's a great, fun way to be able to bounce around some of these harder concepts in our heads.

It [the film industry] is not a glamorous industry. It's really, really hard, and you get told all the time, "You're not this, you're not that," and so you have to find a center.

I had started acting when I was 7, and I was always wrong. I would always get to the very end [of the audition], but I wasn't a perfect package of one thing. I wasn't a cliche, and it always worked against me. I wasn't pretty enough to play the popular girl, I wasn't mousy enough to be the mousy girl. Then there was a TV show that Toni Collette was starring in. And when a role to play a girl who was struggling with identity came, I thought: "Oh, this is what I was supposed to do. Everything's leading up to this moment." I was 18. I was like, "This is it." I didn't get it. And I was devastated.