Nobody ever said, "Well if you want to be in movies, you should go to L.A." Everybody else was going to New York. So I went to New York with them. And then I was like, "How am I supposed to get a movie?"

This dapper little mouse that wore such cute clothes and said such interesting things, yeah. I thought it was a great idea to have a mouse like that in your family, so now I get to see what it was like.

So many female characters are the girlfriend of the person having the adventure. I want to play baseball, I don't want to be the girlfriend of the one [who plays].

It's okay if it takes two or three years for something really good to come along, but I don't want to wait ten years for something great to come along.

Behind the cameras, there's a different problem, which I think is not unconscious gender bias. It's probably categorized more as conscious gender bias. Because everybody's known the numbers for decades. Nobody's stunned to hear there are very few female directors, only 4 or 7 percent. Everybody knows, but it doesn't change anything. It doesn't make people say, "Wow! We should change that." Nothing happens. It's utterly stagnant.

Everything I do, I want to take it to the farthest possible degree. I can't just do something the plain way. I don't cook a bowl of pasta; it has to be puff pastry swans.

I just started asking my friends if they had noticed. None of them - feminists, mothers, daughters - noticed until I pointed it out. Then I decided to bring it up within the industry. I knew a lot of people, so I'd say, "Have you ever noticed how few female characters there are in kids movies?" when I met a director, a producer, whatever. And they said, "Oh, but that's not true anymore."