We have to accept that making movies is a never-ending process of occasional progress, frequent setbacks, and unexpected curveballs being thrown our way. Navigating that process requires stamina, curiosity, openness, and creative fire.

I'm seeing more and more interesting horror come my way. More and more interesting thrillers and genre films are coming my way from the studio level, and they're financed and they have movie stars attached and all of that. But a lot of times, the storytelling just doesn't speak to me. It feels like it's still oftentimes coming out of a kind of prescribed notion of normalcy, prescribed notion of gender roles. There's not a lot of "new" seeming to be happening.

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.

I feel like I don't see myself as all that different from other humans as a woman, but I'm surprised by how frequently I'm asked to see myself differently. So that's one kind of terror to have to face. Am I a unicorn? What's sticking out of my head that I'm not seeing? I'm simply female, and that puts me alongside all of my human counterparts.

Motherhood is this sort of "curtain lifting" of tremendous power that we have individually as women. It's tremendously freaky to have a human being grow inside your body and eventually turn into a human being, and then birth that human being, and then have them be separate from you. Those things are scary. It's also really, really scary to face the idea of losing a child and losing someone you love more than you've loved anything before. All of those things are innately really terrifying, and what it does to me is bring me to a direct kind of confrontation with my human vulnerability.

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."

Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it.