Jill Soloway

A lot of the people I know connect through working. We're all so ambitious. Sometimes my friends will say, 'I want to hang out with you.' And I just go, 'Well, let's do a project together.' That's the only way I can.

We grew up watching Woody Allen and Albert Brooks movies, and we see this neurotic, annoying, unlikeable male at the center of a story, and people root for him anyway. I think that's really what we have been craving as women is the hero who doesn't look perfect and doesn't act perfectly.

When you're making an independent film, it's like this actor plus this actor equals this funding, this financing. Pull this actor out, this actor is still here but this money's gone. It's this frightening puzzle mosaic that is the world of independent film.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.