I felt like I was a writer, and I just thought filmmaking was the best way for me to express that, because it allows me to embrace the visual world that I love. It's allows me to interact with people, to be more social than fiction or poetry, and it felt like the right way for me to tell the stories that felt pressing to me.

There is no way that my mother hasn't influenced my career. She's my first critic. She's my best critic. She has the best instincts from writing to style to editing, to the visual elements of my career.

One of the reasons I'm so proud of my mother is she took her skills of over a 40 years photographic career and translated that to a film.

This weird pressure that mothers are put under, like this idea that if you can't breastfeed, you're not doing something properly, or if you choose not to.

Enjoy going through life as yourself.

Aren't most of us dealing with the fact that we have moms who either weren't ready to be moms or had some level of resentment about it? Everybody is dealing with the different iteration of pain their mom has handed them.

I'm really lucky because my sister is a real activist soul and also hyper-intellectualized in this way that's really allowed me to wrap my mind around some of the bigger intellectual concepts and really understand the language around identity in the gender nonconforming community.