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.

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.

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.

That can be undersold, I think, the importance when you're trying to do something good is that everybody understands the director's vision, everybody believes in it, and everybody can find their own path to supporting it, and that's how you end with a great movie.

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.

Even when you're casting, casting is always one of the weirdest subjective areas. You can get a group of people who would decide and say, "This person is a great actor and this person is less than a great actor," but there will always be somebody else who likes that person better than you based on their experience in their other films.

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.