One of the reasons why I failed was because I figured out in the research process that I couldn't tell it as just, "This is what Frances Farmer's life was like." There are so many questions as to what her life was like because of the way her story has been seized upon and exploited by different factions.

I was trying to see if I could produce an episode - completely write it and research it and record it and edit it - all by myself in a week.

I really feel like I could do anything if given enough time.

I have a degree in cinema studies and the big paper I wrote at the end of that was about Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. So I thought that I knew quite a bit about Judy Garland, but I read in passing that the Stonewall riots were a reaction to her death and I had never really read enough to know what that meant or how that could be true. I was interested in that I knew so much about Judy Garland, but I really didn't know this story.

There's a fantastic, thousand-page book by David Thomson about [David O. Selznick]. Again, it's not the best argument or the best advertisement for his story, because most people aren't going to read a thousand-page book. But I feel like the rise and fall and the work [Mayer] produced - not just the movies, but the memos, the volume of writing - he's just so passionate, and that's really exciting.

There are [in Hollywood] some endemic problems and some things that happen over and over again. There's the problem of representation of basically anybody but white men. These are things that we talk about a lot in contemporary culture, and it's interesting to me to go look at film history from the perspective of today.

The only Sundance [2011] film about cults that could actually have life as a cult film, THE WOODS has the greatest comic insight into why our current culture might inspire a search for meaning in the first place.