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.

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.

As a performer, I could be like, "I don't want to leave that in there." But as a producer, I have to leave it in there.

I just think the David O. Selznick story is one of the great, epic stories of Hollywood history that nobody knows. Maybe one of the reasons why nobody knows it is because he wasn't a movie star.

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

In terms of the way the industry operates, the studio system was such its own thing. It's so different now that it's a globalized world.

Hollywood is really weird to talk about in this monolithic sense because it's this microcosm of anywhere. It's full of a lot of people who have different intentions and different points of view.