As someone who tried to be great. I don't know if one ever gets to greatness, but I've put in a good effort, and will continue to do so.

I encountered Newton when I was growing up, and it has kind of made me who I am, although I came to love Boston. It's a complicated city. Some of the smartest people in the world are in Boston. How many institutions of higher learning are in that one area? It's a pool of intelligence. It's a great town. You can encounter racism anywhere. I have a lot of nostalgic feelings about Boston. It was a cool place to grow up.

I've come to really believe that I have something to offer as a filmmaker, that goes beyond what I had to offer as an actress and maybe this is what I'm meant to do.

I don't over-think my existence. I'm a very imperfect person, like most of us are. I'm also a very busy person. I have a family. I have a career. I'm a professor at NYU. I have a full life for which I feel grateful every day.

Perseverance is what I tell my students. It's important that you keep your dream alive, because you're going to encounter a lot of obstacles, and no one is going to dream big for you. You have to have the fortitude and the resilience to stick with your own dreams. That can be hard.

Honestly, I do spend most of my time between films trying to get the next one made.

The biggest challenges are always getting into the rooms that you need to get into and having people open to the types of stories that I want to tell. And I feel that just being a female director and doing that is a big deal in this country. On my third movie I worked with a French DP. I asked him has he ever worked with a woman director before? He said in France a third of directors are women; so you can’t avoid them. So I realized that the US is behind.