Being a female director become as professional as your male colleagues and forget the whole question about being female. You are female anyway and it is going to work in your favor. The scope of female professional superiority can be understood by so few men that mostly they do not miss it.

I had worked in fiction a lot before I started making documentaries, but when I was around 32 or 33-years-old I suddenly got so fed up with the world of fiction, which is so money-centered.

This is going to sound crazy, especially in America where there is a total inflation of the word "love," but in a sense you have to love the people in front of the camera. There has to be trust between the one who is behind the camera and the people on the other side, so that they can relax. They have to feel they are safe, and that way they don't have to pretend just because they are scared.

I don't think the concept of "directing actors" exists in the sense that if you get what you order from an actor you'll always get bad acting. Every actor is scared just like a regular person.

I went to film school when I was 17, and of course when you are very young you think that there is nothing else in the world except film. At some point I started getting hungry to see something else. For five years I didn't make any films, I was traveling around the world, writing for newspapers, working in theater, working in opera, I thought I would never return to film.

When I make a documentary I shoot very little but I hang around with my camera for a long time. I look at the people for a long time through the loop and then when I see something interested then I shoot. I think that I have become very sensitive to these things.

I went to England when I was 13-years=old and then I went again when I was 14. When I went for the second time I felt like the first summer I was there it was a waste because I didn't exist yet.