A film's success or failure is strictly on the director's shoulders.

Music and language are a vital element. We as actors and directors offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.

Making movies is a very different experience in a lot of ways. It's difficult when you're used to owning the copyright and having a landlord's possessory rights - I rent my plays to the companies that do them and if I'm upset I can pull the play. But the only two directors I've worked with are pretty great.

I like directors who have worked as actors. They know the experience.

Some of us are interested in directors but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.

I'd done table reads for my own screenplays and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts.

One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support and it's really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here where they're all trying to murder each other.

I'm very ambitious. I live in reality but I have dreams I want to fulfill - I want to be a director and I've already started my own production company. But I also have a measure of success that I keep to myself. It's something very personal to me.

In Dreams... well I was slightly overcompensating with that. I was a bit like a director for hire so maybe I was putting too much imagery that was familiar to me into it.

Different people have different styles but there is an opportunity as a director to be a writer in every moment with every visual cue and every piece of production design. Everything is a decision and everything can be obsessed over.