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.

My theory of everything is that we are training kids to have gender bias against girls, therefore when you are an adult, you don't see it. We think it's normal.

One thing is a fairly simple and straightforward thing. I don't long to direct. I really want to get some good parts.

I watched a lot of series. I didn't watch a lot of movies on TV. But I watched Gilligan's Island and Star Trek and all that stuff.

We have it in our heads that women only need to take up a certain amount of space and then we've done right by them. It's the same in every profession. We get a handful of women professors, a few female board members - that looks normal.

An eye-opening moment in my life, a very defining moment, was the first time I met Susan Sarandon [before shooting Thelma & Louise]. We were going to meet, just Ridley [Scott] and Susan and I, to go through the script and see if we had any thoughts or ideas. I was reading the script, and in the most girly way possible, meaning that if it was a line that could change or something different I'd like to see, I would think about each one and say, "Well, this one can wait till the set because I don't want to bring up too many things."

When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.