With journalism, films always have to be to do with some personal statement of your own. As a general rule, I resist that. In the States, a question that kept coming up was this: 'How can you, as a man, talk about three women?'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't know if my films are about women in a kind of frolicking - here's a grab bag of women's issues. They are about women of substance with very particular stories.
You know, when people talk about filmmaking and the techniques of filmmaking, we use them all the time in network television news in order to make our stories simpler, tighter and more understandable to the general public.
When you aren't doing too many films, people find other things to write about you.
It used to be that you could do these nuggets of a movie and it would attach itself in terms of credibility to your work and the style of work that you did, that people would be interested and curious about you and your work as an actor.
Film is our literature, so we should tell stories that are apropos of our culture, in that we can learn something about ourselves.
All my films have some kind of statement about something - but I have to coat it with entertainment to make it palatable. Otherwise it becomes a polemic, and people don't want to see it. If you're trying to get a message out to people, you've got to entertain them at the same time.
Unless you write your own movies... you can't really say what you want to say.
If you're in a film that you're proud of and you care about, then you're always happy to talk about it.
Dividing everybody into genders and sexuality and races and religions, and I think it's important to have films out there, to have discussions out there which really try to get to grips with where that kind of thing can lead.
When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.