The first is that I don’t think “strong” is exactly what’s missing from the depiction of women on screen. I like superhero movies. I love Ripley and Furiosa and so many other film she-roes. But what we’re so often missing is real female characters. Authentic female characters. Complicated and flawed and rich female characters. That’s what was so exciting to me about two of my favorite films last year, Mustang and Diary of a Teenage Girl — I recognized myself in those characters. I loved them and cared about them and learned from them. That’s so important. It’s the entire purpose of art for me, to connect with someone in the secret or sensitive corners of themselves in which they feel the most alone, and say, “You’re not crazy and you’re not weird; I feel this way, too.” The women in those films are whole, authentic humans. They also happen to be female. I love the story about Helen Mirren reading the Eye in the Sky script and saying that she wanted the part, not rewritten for a woman, but as is. I wonder how many films have great characters that could be cast without thinking of gender.

The second thing that bothers me about the female-filmmakers-equals-strong-female-characters equation is that, while I endeavor to write all of my characters well, I don’t really want to be required to only make films about women just because I am one. The number of questions and pushbacks I got about making a father-son story as my first feature made it very clear to me that there was a population of people with a kind of “stay in your lane” mentality. They welcomed women making indies about women, but not necessarily doing anything else. I’m clearly not a father or a son, but I do have the same empathy and imagination that allows many filmmakers to write characters who are astronauts and gangsters and other kinds of people they are not.