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 think Memento movie was hard because people didn't get it, they just didn't understand it. Not from the stage when we read the script and liked it. It's sort of a famous story now how we finished the movie and showed it to distributors and nobody wanted it. So it wasn't just they didn't get the script, they really didn't even understand the movie when it was done. But I think that was a particularly hard one. I don't think it was harder because we were girls, but I do think obviously there are particular challenges to working in a male-dominated industry.

For me and movies - and it is kind of similar to motherhood and raising your children - I always feel like there's more you can do, and I don't know if that's particularly a female quality. I don't know how dads feel, but there's definitely a never say die, no stone unturned, never give up a minute that you could be pushing it down the road and try to make it better.

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.

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.

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.

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.