I feel like this is the way I was meant to interact with acting. Which is as a director, and helping, working with actors to find their way. Facilitating their performances is so satisfying for me.

Hmm, can I be obvious and say there is probably a double standard for male vs. female directors? Sadly, I think that's actually the case. And it probably stems from the fact that there are proportionately so many fewer women directors than men ones that each project is perhaps more closely scrutinized for its content.

I'd love for there to be a situation - a world in which that's just not even a question anymore. We are all filmmakers - different stripes, genders, sexual orientations, colors - and our work can be taken on its own terms. I'm really looking forward to that day.

All we really want in life is to connect to other human beings, and when you desperately want to connect physically to one specific human being and you can't? That's something I find compelling.

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.

Making art, being creative, is risky, especially for actors, but everybody on the set is being creative. You're putting yourself out there with ideas, and to have your brain be free of stress so that it can actually do its best work, it feels like you want to have a real sense of intimacy and connection and trust with everybody.

My mom was in education, and I remember reading in one of her books about multiple intelligences - this whole theory about how there are all these different ways you can be intelligent, like eight or 10 of them or something. And one of them is emotional.