Even during the casting process, the pools of talent are so deep when you have a call for Latin women or black women or a middle-aged woman because they never get their shot. There's so much talent there.

I'm always looking for those places where you can slam really disparate people up against one another, and they have to deal with each other. There are very few crossroads anymore. We talk about this country as this big melting pot, but it's a mosaic. There's all these pieces, they're next to each other, they're not necessarily mixing. And I'm looking for those spaces where people actually do mix.

Even during the casting process, the pools of talent are so deep when you have a call for Latin women or black women or a middle-aged woman because they never get their shot. There's so much talent there.

The oppression of it, the sense of helplessness, and really being part of a system and a bureaucracy that is arbitrary. I never thought of the depth of losing your freedom and what that meant. And I was surprised and delighted by ways people maintain their humanity and try to survive.

We fell in love with different people. Looking back, we might have done it in a different order, but we got invested. We really wanted to do the flashbacks because we wanted to explore who these women were on the outside versus the inside, and get a fuller picture of the masks we wear.

First of all, I find everything funny, which is upsetting to my children sometimes, and to people in my life, in general.

You want everyone to be a full character. No one is just evil, or very few people are, hopefully. They're characters, so you want to flush them out. You've got to show all sides of them. There is definitely an antagonistic relationship between guards and prisoners, and I do think it flares up.