Loving, creative, demanding.

Clumsy, kind and excitable.

Actress, mother, grandmother.

I have to be optimistic. Otherwise I'll stop. And I think that when you're doing this kind of job, you have to keep yourself optimistic. You always have to find openings and entry points and try to see what you can work with and where you can create some opportunity to have a conversation that results in some concrete outcome.

I often say to people that producing is the best paid form of cowardice.

I call it “stolen time”—there’s nothing more valuable than stolen time. It happens to me sometimes when I’ve set up a meeting at my studio at a certain time and it gets cancelled on short notice. When it happens, I’m like a giddy child. I think, “Wow, I’ve stolen half an hour. It’s so exciting—I can do whatever I want!”

I find that you’re a completely different person as a maker than you are as a listener. That’s one of the reasons I so often leave the studio to listen to things. A lot of people never leave the studio when they’re making something, so they’re always in that maker mode, screwdriving things in - adding, adding, adding. Because it seems like the right thing to be doing in that room. But it’s when you come out that you start to hear what you like.

My favorite method is stopping everything for a moment. It’s amazing how difficult I find it these days to simply sit quietly.

I like to break up days and structure them. You have breakfast, work for two hours on a project, check your emails, work on another project for another two hours and then lunch. Your day has to be a measurable process, in order to minimize aimless drifting. Of course, you can have some days on automatic pilot, and there’s nothing wrong with drifting in and of itself. But you can’t do that every day—you’ll never get anywhere.