Somebody asked me, "When was the last time it was harder for you as a woman"? And I was like, "What time is it? Do you mean today?" I hate to say that, because it sounds so depressing, but it absolutely happens in many many ways all the time, large and small ways. But it's not like it creates new pain for me on a daily basis, it's just a pain that I accepted long ago. It's definitely harder.

The hard thing for me, and it took me many years to understand, the concept of Hollywood not being a meritocracy - I am a middle child, and as most middle children will tell you, that never goes away, wishing the world was fair and understanding.

The crazy thing is, I sent out 200 letters and I got one job interview, and I actually got that job, which was working as a development assistant at Joel Silver's company. I always say that to people when they ask "What do I do?" and I'm like, "Look, I didn't get ten responses, and I didn't get five interviews, but I got one interview, and I got the job," and that was all I needed.

The first thing you do as a producer is you try to understand the director's vision in as deeply a way as you can. Sometimes, you end up with a director that has more vision or sometime they have less vision. You hope that they have more. In the case where they have more, you need to understand it in the deepest way you can.

You want to put people together who will work well, and each movie kind of has its own personality in terms of how people are working or the temperature on set, and we want people who will fit in with that mix. It's one of the really important parts of it.

I only worked on that one movie, but then quickly realized that the path of being an assistant director was not gonna get me to producing. It's a different path coming up through production management and then line producing. So I basically was in the position where I was going to take any job that felt creative, like the one I got, which was reading scripts and writing coverage. So even though I was taking a job where I was making less money than the job immediately prior, it seemed like the right thing for me.

I remember somebody had said to me "What're you doing with a movie like Boiler Room? It's all men and you're a woman. You should be making romantic comedies," or something like that. Boiler Room, for me, was a morality tale. I remember this interview where they said to me "Yeah, but all the characters are men," and I was like, "But I'm a girl, I like men!" It's not like there's nothing interesting to me just because a lot of characters in that movie happen to be male. Just because I'm a girl doesn't mean I only wanna make Must Love Dogs over and over again.