A movie is like a tip of an iceberg, in a way, because so little of what you do in connection with making a movie actually gets into the movie. Almost everything gets left behind.
I have spent my whole life trying to prove that women can get into politics. I'd now say to them, 'For God's sake don't do it - you'll get slaughtered.'
We're going to be treated very poorly, I think that goes with the territory, and you have to get over it, get beyond it and know who you are among your peers and especially among your family when you look in the mirror.
When you're directing, you see your ideas. You see them created right in front of you on the monitor and the sound stage. You get that experience all over again when you get into the editing room and you start playing with it.
Film is such a bizarre vehicle for acting. It's such a bizarre experience. I don't think you ever really get familiar with it. If you do get familiar with it, you're probably not that good anymore.
But that we didn't have the level of experience in terms of working in the industry so you weren't sure and you needed to see it and this is an industry that the more you work the better you get and that the more opportunities you have the better you...
You want to know my real pleasure? Food. I love chocolate. I can't get enough chocolate. I can't help it. But my biggest pleasure of all is exercise. I really get off on exercise.
I love food. I'm a complete foodie. I love to cook. I find it very hard to say no to food. I get grumpy if I don't get food.
There's tons of creative people in television that have one failure after another, and they just step up higher. I could never get over that. When I had a failure, there was no such thing as just getting over it.
I never took that stuff personally when people said I was too young, too inexperienced. I get politics. I get attack ads. But they said 'mobbed up family.' That we were criminals. That kills me.
Family, to me, is most important, and I can't wait to have one of my own, but I am not going to rush into it. I don't want to get a divorce. I want to take my time, do it once and get it right.
Getting a family into work, supporting strong relationships, getting parents off drugs and out of debt - all this can do more for a child's well-being than any amount of money in out-of-work benefits.
Anything that gets in the way of my focus to create gets cut out of my life. It's not easy. Sometimes it's family. Sometimes it's friends. Sometimes it's the ability to have a relationship.
The thing that helped me get into the film business was that I went to school in Athens, Georgia and managed to get on, um, working on music videos for a band called R.E.M. and that kind of opened up a lot of doors for me.
As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.
I've always been one for show business. I like performing, and I used to get criticized for having production value. But now it's all that! People need to get what they pay for! Otherwise, just listen to recorded music.
On a personal level, I send out about 20 thank-you notes a day to staffers, on all levels. And every six weeks I have lunch with a group of a dozen or so employees, to get their perspective on the business, to address problems and to get feedback.
I've fallen back on this periodically, although I must say that getting out of the grocery business ranked right up there with getting out of the army as one of the happier experiences of my life.
Our fathers were actually business partners in the same real-estate firm, and we got together and thought, How can we get a movie together and get distribution and create a new movie genre? We started by making satires of commercials.
I'd watch my father get up at 5 o'clock and go down to the Eastern Market in Detroit to do the shopping for his restaurant, and get that business going and then go out on his vending machine business.
I do like to work with young directors because it's such a difficult business that I think after directors have been around a while sometimes, not always, but sometimes their passion gets siphoned off because they get hurt.
