I'm really interested in violence. And I think there's an inevitably cinematic property that violence brings to the moviegoing experience. But one still has to be thoughtful and mature about how you depict it and how you think it through. You have to think about the effects that violence has on audiences, and it's deployed so casually that I think it's losing its meaning. And when things like violence and murder and the dehumanization of other people lose their meaning, then we're really kind of in a place where we have to reexamine and take a hard look at ourselves.

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 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."

To me, the thing that sets us apart from so many other animal species is our ability to ask questions, investigate, gather information, come to our own conclusions, and sometimes depart from the pack, sometimes move away from the tribe. And I'm not seeing a lot of that right now among a sizable portion of American politics and American voters. I'm not seeing that kind of use of critical thinking, and it really, really freaks me out.

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.

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 am honored and lucky to be one of the first films funded by Gamechanger Films, a consortium of investors who finance movies directed by women.