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.

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 - 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. When we don't listen, our understanding of the world gets more and more distorted, and we become capable of doing things we very often regret.

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

I don't want to make studio films if I am constantly fighting to assert some kind of leadership within the process. I'm not hired to be a really nice person who comes up with solutions to problems now and then. I'm hired to be the director.

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.

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.