Half the fun is getting to play dress-up and imagine what it's like to be this other person. If you're not excited about a part where you get to use your imagination, then what's the point in doing it? It'll be just another job. Also, Director Michael Pressman and I see eye-to-eye with Marie.

Every piece of writing I've done has been something where I feel like I need to get this out of me, whether it's a seed of something personal or an anxiety that turns into a play or an image that's in my mind and haunts me that I'm trying to investigate.

I would not wear any clothes that had a brand name on them, and I only read books that were canonical. I wouldn't wear makeup, and I didn't like to let boys open the door for me because I felt like it was sexist. My heart was in the right place, but I was such a tiny dictator about it. It's embarrassing to me now because I was so rigid. It's such a rigid way of looking at the world. There's something very young about that mind-set.

I think a large part of an actor's job in preparation is just making the words feel organic to them, and obviously they came out of me, so they felt organic to me already. And then I think then it was all about clearing away all the other voices.

I'm definitely feeling whatever's going on pretty hard. It's like playing Barbies. You're holding the Barbies, but all of the action is happening inside of your head. You might be holding them or even speaking out loud, but really, all of the animation is internal. That's sort of how I feel about my writing. And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, "Hmm, there's half a page that's good here." Then you throw out everything else.

Most adults get to a point in their careers where they feel secure, where they have a body of work behind them that will ensure longevity, and for actors, it's just not like that. You're basically always a temp, going from job to job.

I've always really been interested in the Pygmalion myth and both what it has to say about creativity and what it has to say about relationships between men and women. I'd been thinking about what I would want to do with that if I was going to write on that theme, and one morning I woke up and Calvin and Ruby Sparks were in my head.