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.

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.

Somebody pointed out to me that there's no horror film on my resume, which is true, but I also don't really go see those movies. Although when I was thinking about it, I was thinking "I would probably have a really nice beach house if I made a horror movie." They seem to be very popular. I just don't think it's my thing.

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.

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.

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 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.