I was 16 or something. [My aunt] broadened my understanding of what women could be like and do and that there's a big world out there. So she had a huge impact on me.

Are you stupid or did you just take lessons?

There were so many women who had worked throughout the war in every possible job. They were told, "Now leave, so the men can come in" and there was this whole feminizing of women: You have to be very, very retiring and submissive and whatever.

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.

I had a deliberate plan to get into movies by becoming a model, so I went to New York and got a job pretending to be a mannequin in store windows.

My whole theory about why I couldn’t find any creators who realized they were leaving out female characters is because they were raised on the same ratio. I just heard someone the other day call it either ‘smurfing’ a movie, which is when there’s one female character, or ‘minioning’ a movie, which is when there’s no female characters.

I'm the mother of two daughters, one of whom is going to get possessed. It's really spooky and great. I'm shooting it right now. That's why I'm in Chicago. I wanted to tell you about the other direction that this trying-to-get-more-female-characters thing has taken, which is that I launched my own film festival last year.