I do think it's possible for me to go back to the studio, and for a lot of women filmmakers to be going back into studio filmmaking with a different sense of their own agency, and a different sense of the respect that they can command. When you asked the question about whether women want to be making big studio movies, the answer is almost always yes. It's just, how do they want to be treated? What is that experience going to be? And if you know the experience is gonna be shitty going into it, I personally am at a place where I'm not willing to punish myself any longer.

There's no glory in climbing a mountain if all you want to do is to get to the top. It's experiencing the climb itself - in all its moments of revelation, heartbreak, and fatigue - that has to be the goal.

There's just so much lazy violence directed at women. But beyond that, lazy violence directed at humans generally. Just lazy violence.

I do think it's possible for me to go back to the studio, and for a lot of women filmmakers to be going back into studio filmmaking with a different sense of their own agency, and a different sense of the respect that they can command. When you asked the question about whether women want to be making big studio movies, the answer is almost always yes. It's just, how do they want to be treated? What is that experience going to be? And if you know the experience is gonna be shitty going into it, I personally am at a place where I'm not willing to punish myself any longer.

I want people to leave the theater wrestling with the idea that our pain - physical, emotional, and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed, or "fixed."

Women still routinely get passed over when everyone sits around the table and says, "What's our list of 10, 20, 30 directors that we wanna put at the top of our list for this project?" You need more people who are either women who care about this issue or men who care about this issue, who are sitting in this room and saying, "Guys, where are the women? We need to be going out to women." And particularly in the projects that really could use a fresh feminine perspective, whatever that ultimately means.

That complacency and that willingness to give yourself over to a larger power structure is how civilizations destroy themselves. And I just hope people wake up from the slumber they've willed themselves to. Because we're really in a dark place right now.