- I started working when I was 13. Unlike most people you hear about, I didn't have magic fairy dust thrown at me. I had lots of circumstances that should have made me "make it" as opposed to halfway "making it." I've had everything go right the way it's supposed to and not see the same results as those famous stories we hear about in Hollywood, entertainment, media, and art in general. I realized if I had to do something big, I had to go out on my own, and that is what I'm doing now so that my music and filmmaking will finally be recognized. My motto is, "If you don't believe in yourself, no one will."
- Everyone in this movie (The Eyes of Old Texas), from small cameos to big roles, may be famous, but none with the exception of one person are professional actors, yet we all wanted to make a movie with every inch of our hearts. The feeling is mutual, and one of, We're going to make a movie as if we are the first people ever making a movie.
- I was always wishing, "OK, will this job lead me to being a film director and film score composer? Will it help me meet people?" And oddly, I was right. I met my film (The Eyes of Old Texas)'s business partner when I interviewed him on my ELLE Spain blog.
- If John Williams composed it, I had to play it. I to this day thank my teachers and tutors for being so good. I was given old time classical music to rehearse but so much film related music, of course it stuck! What else would happen? The big question was as a kid, how am I going to do this as an adult? Because adults would tell me, you can't do movies and music both. The same question hit me when I was 20 and had just had a filmmaker steal the theme he asked me to make him only to hire a known composer to do my own theme in his movie! Where do I go from here? The answer was immediately telling myself, "You have to brand yourself. Make yourself known somehow so nobody will ever steal your work again."
- I taught myself how to compose when I was about 11. I went to some bookstore on a trip to St. Louis and got sheet music. I made myself do it again and again until I learned it.
- I get so excited meeting filmmakers, known and those of the future. We all share a grand love of cinema you cannot buy. People try to buy this love of movies at film schools. You can't force it. It happens to you. Like falling for someone romantically, it happens inexplicably. You have no control over it.
- When I was younger, I met Condoleezza Rice at a big red carpet event. She was so nice. I loved meeting her, hearing her speak, and then her chatting to me. She happened to know the female celebrity I was sitting next to, and it went from there. She didn't care that I was not on some hot TV sitcom. Ms. Rice treated me like I was as important as the women in the room who were. I learned she was really a talented musician who sometimes wonders what her life might have been like had she gone down that route. She wasn't wearing a ton of makeup, overly trendy clothing, or revealing clothing. She didn't need anything special other than her mind to impress people. I found that beautiful and inspiring and do today.
- I loved Dorothy Dandridge, Judy Garland, and all of these on screen women who often sang music outside of their film careers. I practiced hard to have a 1950's Mid Atlantic film girl accent when I sang because I wanted to be like them. I still frequently incorporate that Mid Atlantic retro sound when I sing rock music.
- I have felt like a loser that I did not start my filmmaking aspirations when I was a lot younger because the stars weren't aligning for me, no matter what I did. All that time, I was doing freelance print journalism. A lot of the time, I wrote what interested me. Much of it also was not. A filmmaker told me, "Think of your journalism career as the greatest screenwriting class in history."
- I have no shame in saying I view Christopher Nolan as one of my fashion icons. I can absolutely dress like him or the men I admire and mix it with a skirt, a black dress, or my jeans. Save the bikini for the pool. When you show up full of silly ruffles like a cupcake or half naked somewhere special where all eyes are on you, the attention of the very people you want to be like in your career, nobody is going to listen to your ideas.
- I've long said one of my goals is, "To change the world with my art." Don't ask me how I could ever pull this off. I would love to have a solid majority of my movies, short and feature length, to include positive messages. Perhaps to successfully do this, I might have to use mainstream filmmaking styles. Action movies. Sarcasm. All the main tricks. Overall, I'd love to have positivity thrown in.
- I'm out here to meet all kinds of new friends like Hello Kitty, if you will, as a metaphor. I know that if I am going to pave my way in this career goal world, I have to be the one who does it. Nobody else can do that for me. When I meet people, everyone senses that. And, when you gain someone's trust, they'll often teach you unintentionally, and you learn unintentionally. You'll start talking about French fries and end up hearing what a person says about today at work. They gain from your optimism they maybe no longer have as much at this stage in their careers, and you gain from their life experiences. There's nothing I love like hearing someone's life experiences.
- Since I was 11, I always wanted to win Academy Awards for Best Original Score and Best Director. Because I have had to work harder to prove myself, winning those two awards to me means I've finally won in the game of proving myself.
- People will say mean things to get publicity. Look like an image they feel uncomfortable with. You're supposed to be on every social media platform, despite you perhaps disliking one. You're supposed to sing or rap lyrics in which men and women in them have no power over their sexuality. Go with the flow. And, if you disagree, it's said you won't work again. This is false. Men I ask for advice or who offer it to me without asking tell me, no, all of what we are said to believe isn't true. They advise me to look at people I want to be like and ask, "If he wouldn't do that, why are you?" The men who run Hollywood aren't posting all day long on social media about shoes they buy every day. They don't dictate how they create films according to what they look like.
- I had to learn how to animate on my own when I've never studied art apart from the childhood art classes I took after school and summertime during elementary school years. Using the computer to animate. Developing my own style. I do a lot of green screening stuff for cartoons. Transferring hand-drawn materials onto the computer and building upon those. So much. It did not happen overnight. I thought, "Hey," in 2015, "I can animate this. I can probably draw. I used to draw well as a child." "And no, it's so much more than picking up a skill you have not touched in years. It took me about two and a half to three years of me pounding away making mistakes, researching how to's, and all I can say is no way will you learn from any book, video how to, anything unless you do things yourself a million times messing up until you find your way and retrain your brain to be crazy about animation.
- Beyond looking a certain way and being told by publicists all my life I sought tips from and just about everyone to hide who I really am, I was often told because I happened to be born female, I have to make chick flicks. As someone who loathes the majority of chick flicks or clichéd women's humor, I felt all alone. People told me to be Reese Witherspoon. Make chick flicks. Produce them. Star in them. No, I want to be Peter Jackson with some of my own trilogy adaptation ideas I've had since childhood.
- Let's think about how much men might not be taken seriously if they showed up looking like some female celebrities do. I notice all the time how my role models in film, who are all men, show up on a red carpet in a suit or tuxedo, sometimes a vest with that. Always fully clothed. When casual, these men I look up to, many I know and some I have yet to know, show the world their beautiful minds. They are loved for their talent and intellect. These men do so because they're fully clothed. And I always say to young people, "How would you feel if Peter Jackson accepted his awards wearing a polka dotted loincloth? Would you take him seriously?"
Kids say they'd laugh. Some young people say things like, "I'd think he's really weird! That's like, a man bikini! Who would wear a man bikini to accept an Oscar?!" You hear all these things. And then to these same young people I meet, I say, repeating what men have told me, "So if we reversed things, how do you feel about a woman doing that? Don't you think when a woman accepts an award in something revealing like a bikini cut dress, it keeps us from hearing what she has to say?" - Whereas a live action movie like what Lena Dunham made, this lovely indie movie, Tiny Furniture, might be a lot less time consuming but then she spent all her time taking apart the script as her movie depended on strong writing and relationships. I feel you have to decide where the emphasis is. Of course, my movies will always have writing but the majority of rom-com and indie cinema is built on relationships or the building of them. And animation, action, sci-fi, more the stuff I want to do, is built on the special effects and visuals.
- I end up working with people who've been mean to me assuming I'm a nobody because I am not the star of some E! reality show or a sitcom. People think, "She's not on TV. She doesn't know anyone." And the truth is, I've been around longer than pretty much half, if not more, of the people who doubt me. I've simply never been photographed because I didn't walk arm in arm with a publicist turning me into a celebutante of the moment, or I didn't want to star on reality TV as another flash in the pan exploited young person.
- My life, this whole thing we call life, in it I feel almost like I could be a Pedro Almodóvar movie character who's gaining depth and changing. He writes about people like me. I adore him. One day, I want to have lunch with him and have my Spanish all perfected to speak entirely with him en español sobre las peliculas que me han inspirado. Nobody I know is friends with him or has any connection to him. He has no public social media I can contact him on where I can slide into his DMs. My only resource at the moment is to establish myself more as a filmmaker and contact him by pigeon. A bilingual pigeon, specifically, because I can't take a chance on the bird getting lost en español and delivering a note to someone called Pedro in nearby Portugal.
- I kind of idolize people from the Midwest who've made it big. Walt Disney was from a town in Missouri and moved to Kansas City before being famous. That alone says something to me.
- My stories give kids a real plot they might find in a film targeted towards a PG-13 or R audience, with all the bad words and adult content removed down to a family friendly level, with a lot of silliness tossed in. I'm actually not joking, yes, my work is the only of its kind out there treating children as miniature adults.
- I want a princess to fall for a guy everyone else thinks is unattractive and wrong all over but she finds the sexiest man on earth and angers her parents in going out with him, only to prove them wrong.
- A music teacher taught me a while back, well, taught us, but the other kids weren't listening, a good idea is to treat music like a foreign language. Always listen to music a good bit before you start working on it because your brain will begin thinking in that language. I take it a step further and totally silence everything out. I'll listen to music ten to thirty minutes before I start working on something. It could or could not be a sample demo of what I'm trying to improve. It could be anything on the radio. You need your brain to stop thinking in words. You want your brain to go crazy. And when you do finally get to that point, thinking in words again and having conversations aloud feels so weird.
- My mind gets really bored by knowing what will happen next. For my mind to be happy, I have to train it like I'm doing puzzles. What that means is I have zero tolerance for doing the same thing over and over again. Of course, making a movie and composing classical music does involve some repetition, but nowhere near what most "regular" jobs involve.
- When a young boy says he wants to direct movies, people give him a camera and how to book. When a girl says the same thing, they ask her to be an actress.
- I'm not going to only want to be known for a sex tape like this new crop of people. I don't want people to see my name and think, "Sex tape. A career built on nothing." I'm not going to be famous because of the bigness or smallness of some body parts! I see the new thing now is to be "the model with a big chest" or "the singer with a big behind." When you work with gimmicks like that and don't build talent as much as you can, you're replaceable. So while sure, it may have taken me longer to get here, I hope I'm not replaceable. That I am a unique person with something special to offer the world.
- I like color and black and white as a contrast. I try to speak a lot though color.
- I would be lying if Hans Zimmer did not play an unintentional role in what I'm doing now. Not because I was a big fan of his or anything, although I am, but because so much of my homework, in between all the classical pieces, you have so much Disney, and when it's not Disney, you look down at the names on your homework, and it's repetition. John Williams, the vault of Mr. Zimmer. I never set out, "I'm gonna be like him," but my teachers made sure I was.
- That's what gets you in trouble is if you pretend to be cool and whatever cool is. Regardless of whether you are cool or not, if you are at the moment, there will be a time when you are not. Because fads come and go.
- It's ridiculous hearing women get discriminated against when, like I always say, gender is a scientific fact, nothing more.
- Mainstream modeling when I did it was about using you as a pawn. And when you were doing legitimate modeling, there was always a pressure to be naked or sell sex when you were supposed to be selling mainstream products, for example. I would have felt cool and down with being in underwear if I were selling underwear, like Victoria's Secret. It makes sense for the product. You shouldn't have a model in underwear or revealing clothes to sell a hairdryer.
- I want to accept a Best Director Academy Award dressed in a menswear-inspired suit and tie to prove I am just like everyone else who ever wins that award. My dream would be to win a Best Original Score award on the same night. And, like I said, that I do it dressed like every other male winner so the focus isn't on me dressed in an itchy, cupcake ball gown or my gender as some novelty for the record books and clickbait news headlines.
- If dead composers came alive today, they would think everyone is a fraud for splitting up duties into a screenwriter, a director, so forth. I am very old school. I always wish I were born in another century to have done that. Because I am not, I make the most of it.
- Eating food at restaurants is a hobby for me. Getting around to restaurants doesn't always happen enough lately, and it makes the experience all the more exciting.
- My biggest successes haven't happened yet. I want to win Academy Awards for filmmaking and film music, a very difficult task. Many say they want Oscars. Hardly anyone gets nominated and fewer win. I want to direct a movie that opens some places in IMAX. A list of goals in my head.
- I like to make tea. All kinds of tea. Earl grey is my fav, and authentic chai from India or UK-made but close to Indian style is a close second. The best Earl Grey I have had lately is from Israel. I love watching birds outside as I drink my morning tea.
- [on her Hollywood role models] People who either transition out of other careers to be the leaders in the film industry, like Peter Jackson and James Cameron, or people working as successful film score composers thus creating job opportunities for my generation, like James Horner and Hans Zimmer. Art wise, I am a fan of too many filmmakers' works to count.
- Newer books don't speak to me. Poetry is awesome. I have "War of the Worlds" on my iPad right now. Binge reading isn't for me. Reading a chapter whenever I have a moment is. Very relaxing.
- The beach is amazing, though secretly, because I grew up seeing dark skies and pollution, I love industrial, cold metropolis cities like Manhattan and Chicago. Places where I don't have to worry about car transportation!
- If it were a heart rate monitor, some English language music might look almost like a straight line and Scandinavian music would have ups and downs. Japanese music can be more whimsical, as can Korean pop. It's good if you feel stuck in a rut.
- [on someday directing her interpretation of Carmen] Turning it upside down for a cinematic experience unlike anything you've ever seen. I loved a story about a woman who seduces men with her music, beauty, and personality without ever once taking off her clothes.
- When people spread lies about someone or make fun of someone, it is because they want to feel superior. The meanest people very often are successful in the home as parents raising beautiful families with happy marriages, or they are prominent in their careers. They might be really attractive or talented. And yet, that person feels inadequate. The first step you take is understanding. An example I can share is years ago, a successful woman decades older than me made fun of me in front of her friend. She had no shame in me hearing everything she said. Something had to be wrong with her making fun of a girl who could be her daughter. I was less than half of her age!
- The assumption is that someone makes a movie and collects a massive paycheck. In the beginning, you make films to show studios you are serious. Nobody hires anyone, famous actors included, to make a major studio movie with a $150 million or more budget as a first time director. They want to see you are active promoting your low budget films into at least minor success stories because the studios will want to know you can turn their films they give you lots of money for into billion dollar worldwide hits. I work hard promoting my small films. You don't stick a film of any length out in the wild expecting studios to show up because you made a movie. Everyone starting out in films mistakenly thinks having a film is enough.
- Native New Yorkers, and Midwesterners like me in Chicago, we get loads of famous people living there or coming in, we grow up exposed to celebrities in every profession, and we don't give a care in the world about someone being on TV because that person is smoking in your face, butting in line in front of you, cursing at you. You see the real them. And when you see tourists from small towns freaking out like someone is a living deity because they cross paths with them outside Rockefeller Center, you question why tourists think less of themselves. Those tourists are quite often bettering humanity in some small way as teachers or volunteering at homeless shelters. The tourists are relevant in some way. And yet, they are screaming for someone famous for being on reality television? As if they aren't also human beings?
- If I had more time, I might be able to make more films at once. If such a thing were possible!
- Maybe this is a combination of me being from Illinois and having Midwestern ideals mixed with seeing my great uncle and others, and seeing how successful Hollywood men I want to be like started out, be frugal. Start small with the money you invest. You can invest a lot of time, but money is precious.
- Know that the moment you accept any money from an investor, be it your aunt or a stranger, that person owns you.
- Waiting forever for someone to hire you is a very bad plan. People are taught that you are supposed to be someone's apprentice or work for another person. What if you do, and you never become successful on your own afterwards? Or what if that never happens? You never work for someone important in your industry because nobody will hire you? I graduated early with a university degree seeing no results from it. My life experiences are about being that person who never gains anything out of doing all the right things when I try them. I didn't want to make the same mistakes for my film and film music goals.
- What I'm trying to explain: when you sign up for this, you're signing up for oh so much more. My job is not film directing and film score composing. I study special effects. I act in my own work to learn how to better direct actors. 90 percent of your eventual success is marketing yourself to that point. I see how everyone else has. Every once in awhile, someone tells me how he did it. Nobody says he got there by talent or being in the right place at the right time. You market yourself until someone in power hires you. And then again for people in power to keep hiring you.
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