As a producer and director, I've tried for years to get properties off the ground for girls, and I've been hitting a brick wall.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was one of the first women producers in Hollywood.
Directors have to push me. I have to be pushed up. Not all the time, but often.
I have been a producer and director for many years, and I can say it's really difficult for women, although the women in Mexico suffer as much as other women in the world. The first thing is to get respect for the work you do. Then it is about getting the money. And this respect comes little by little over the years.
I feed off variety. I don't want to repeat myself if I can help it, but once they've seen you doing one thing, directors often just want you to do it again.
I finally, you know, moved to Mexico City, where the film industry is. I started working there as a producer, which is a very, very valid thing for women to do, because we always produce for men, right?
I'm lucky enough that directors sometimes seek me out for little projects that people don't even know about, that just surface later on.
I still get called 'a stick of dynamite' or 'pint-sized dynamo,' stuff like that. Actually, I was too busy to notice there was anything unusual about being a woman director until the early 1980s, when I looked around the professional theater and realized there weren't many of us. You have to make more of a case for yourself than any man.
When you're a director, you really live whatever you do.
I basically put myself into directors' hands and let them tell me what to do, and the more they told me what to do, the more I liked it.
I started to have these ideas for films. They were like running images in my head. But I didn't think I could be a director. I just literally didn't think it was a possibility. Then I started to suddenly see films of women.