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?"

When I started out, maybe because I did Thelma & Louise early on - but people were always asking, "Are things better for women now?" I would say, "Yeah, I think so. It seems like it." Then a few years in, I started saying, "I think so. I'm getting a lot of good parts, but I don't know." Then eventually, I was like, "Google it. I don't know, but it doesn't seem great."

Once I fix what kids watch, I'll be moving on to everything else.

I realized that in all the sectors of society where there's a huge gender disparity, the one place that can be fixed overnight is onscreen. You think about getting half of Congress, or the presidency ... It's going to take a while no matter how hard we work on it. But half of the board members and half of the CEOs can be women in the next movie somebody makes; it can be absolutely half.

I meet Susan [Saradon], and she was amazing. We sit down to go through the script [Thelma & Louise]. I swear, I think it was page one - she says, "So my first line, I don't think we need that line. Or we could put it on page two. Cut this ..." And I was just like ... My jaw was to the ground.

Kids need to see entertainment where females are valued as much as males.

This is really funny, but we did a study of the occupations of female characters on TV, and there are so many female forensic scientists on TV because of all the CSI shows and Bones and whatever. I don't have to lobby anybody to add more female forensic scientists as role models. There's plenty.In real life, the people going into that field now are something like two-thirds women.