It's like you might have some great scene that you love but for some reason - and you can't necessarily put your finger on it - the movie's not working or it seems slow or ponderous in some way, and even though it has your favorite scene in there, actually the favorite scene is the culprit. That's the painful thing about editing, is trying to locate those things that are holding the movie back and then having the guts to cut them. And it is painful to do it.

I think it worked two ways. One, a lot of people writing about the movie used that as shorthand and it could either be a good thing or they could use it to dismiss the movie like we were a copycat movie or something like that. It's very much its own story. It is a young woman in a post-apocalyptic society, but after that it's just a whole different kind of story and a different journey that she goes through.

On one hand it's very flattering to be compared to a big success, and then sometimes it's very frustrating because you want people to see the movie that you're making and not be continually comparing it to something that it's not. So it goes both ways.

If a character is going to end up one way, you start them a certain way. If they're gonna end up the polar opposite of that, you might start them differently to have dramatic integrity to their journey.

It's like you might have some great scene that you love but for some reason - and you can't necessarily put your finger on it - the movie's not working or it seems slow or ponderous in some way, and even though it has your favorite scene in there, actually the favorite scene is the culprit. That's the painful thing about editing, is trying to locate those things that are holding the movie back and then having the guts to cut them. And it is painful to do it.

I think we all want something to knock us on the head and change our lives.

At a certain point, I got interested in set design for the theater. I was interested in architecture, but I was taking photographs at the same time, and architecture, though it had the design element, it didn't have the narrative, emotional element that I was looking to do. I ended up painting for a while. I was dancing around it, and I realized that all these different interests came together in filmmaking.