I want women to be the subject, not the object.
By recognizing your own vulnerability you can recognize and identify with the vulnerability in others.
The only way things will change will be when we're all wilder, louder, riskier, sillier, unexpectedly overflowing with surprise.
Along the way, female filmmakers will have the feeling that they're not good enough. And that's really just a result of being "otherized" from the moment they're born. Keep an eye out for all those insecurities, and even expect them. Borrow white male privilege and just move through the world as if it was created for you. You have to kind of talk yourself into an imaginary space where the world is on your side and expects you to speak and wants you to speak. You have to create that space for yourself over and over again. Every hour sometimes.
You have to totally change the way that society's structured in order to being to heal.
When I write, I lose time. I'm happy in a way that I have a hard time finding in real life. The intimacy between my brain and my fingers and my computer... Yet knowing that that intimacy will find an audience... It's very satisfying. It's like having the safety of being alone with the ego reward of being known.
As you grow and change, you become possibly someone else. You want to go back to your family of origin and say, ‘Do you still love me? Would you still love me if I become X or Y or Z? When will you stop loving me? Is this unconditional love and if not what are the conditions?’
So for me to actually have access to women, to feminist women, to gay people, to trans people, to intellectuals, iconoclasts, weirdos, academics, just the people who don't normally get marketed to, in some way I kinda hoped that if I could collect all of them, I could say, "Hey! Look over here! There are enough people who like my stuff." And it sorta has seemed to be true.
I'm happy to always be included in the list of women. I'd like to be in the sections about female leaders and male leaders. Why not?
I've been told by people I respect that flashbacks only work if they have their own narrative, but they can't be part of the present narrative.
It will feel boring when you're bingeing.
I still see storytelling for men by men that is always reinforcing the male gaze.
In my own work I am invested in art as a way to break through impasses, whether those impasses are personal, social, or political.
In the little travel I've done to other countries, the Jews there embraced me saying, Come to our house, come and have Shabbat with us. Jews in the Diaspora. I didn't imagine an Israeli traveling to the U.S. would feel this intensity of a forced relationship.
We stay away from pop culture almost all the time, you know. That's sort of a rule. You won't really hear people on our show talking about Beyoncé or Adele. We try to make it a little bit more timeless.
If you go to Europe, public bathrooms have any-gender sink areas and stalls for everyone to use. This is completely reasonable. It potentially involves the destruction of the urinal industry, which I think people would be happy to see go away.
There are a whole bunch of people - Republicans or sports fans or reality TV fans - who probably would never have recognized that they have trans people in their world. Caitlyn Jenner really is thinking about the movement and saving lives, so I know that her intentions are honorable.
I think kids in general are much more capable of understanding the idea of being transgender than adults.
We do want the freedom to move scenes from episode to episode to episode. And we do want the freedom to move writing from episode to episode to episode, because as it starts to come in and as you start to look at it as a five-hour movie just like you would in a two-hour movie, move a scene from the first 30 minutes to maybe 50 minutes in. In a streaming series, you would now be in a different episode. It's so complicated, and we're so still using the rules that were built for episodic television that we're really trying to figure it out.
If people want to watch that five hours [of stream show] on their own terms in their own schedule. It needs to work if somebody wants to stop after an hour and a half or stop after half an hour. People talk about it like food. Like, "I just want to let you know I'm saving it." They talk about it like pasta. "I'm saving it. I'm only going to have one a week." And I love the fact that everybody can have their own experience and I want to make sure that what we put out there works in as many ways as possible.
There is a real comfort with the position of the victim, which can either result in true empathy or deep paranoia.
I did a piece where I was talking about torture at Abu Ghraib, and I embroidered my hand with the image of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoners who'd been tortured using a needle and thread. I know that meeting a Holocaust survivor when I was eight and seeing the tattoo on her arm from her time in the camps influenced my piece about Abu Ghraib.
I haven't made art about Israel. There's a covert subtext of Jewish identity in my artwork.
That was something that I learned from Alan Ball from “Six Feet Under." He didn”t really like to have too many pop culture references because they don”t really hold up after a few years.
Many of the trans women who are in our world are also in Caitlyn's Jenner world. And yes I've definitely spoken to her multiple times, talked to her, socialized with her. It's a small community when all is said and done, the trans community in Los Angeles. So everybody really knows each other and everybody's in contact.
