"This extraordinary series, based on the collection of books, portrays the story of two young girls and their friendship over time. What is astounding to me is the agency and the “voice” of the two young prepubescent girls that is shown in ways rarely seen on screen. Psychologist Carol Gilligan, wrote extensively of the ways in which girl’s voices are squashed and eradicated by puberty. Likewise, filmmakers rarely portray this vital stage in young girl’s development. As the series progress and the two girls age, their female characters are impacted, twisted, and crushed by the pressure of society. It’s rare that one actually witnesses the crushing of girls into adults in such an exquisitely truthful manner. How these two girls struggle to survive and thrive under the pressures of marriage and sexuality and lack of educational access clamping down on them with their identity intact is brilliant. At the end of season one, I had the rarest experience: I felt like I had just finished one episode, not eight, as if I was at the very beginning of the story, not the end, and I longed for more narrative to come."

"Mad World’ is a great song and it has some personal significance for me. When I was on American Idol - you know how when you're on these competition shows, and you have these moments? - it was like my big moment. It was the one that people talked about for a while. “I remember the first time I heard the version by Gary Jules, which is in Donnie Darko. That was the version where I was like 'What?' Both versions of ‘Mad World’ are so brilliant and I think the thing about the song itself that's so brilliant is that it's talking about being disillusioned or disenfranchised as a youth, and with society, feeling like an outsider, and feeling like your voice doesn't matter. I would guess that the song is about dark times. “I think that now we're in a time where things like suicide and bullying and identity politics are so in the forefront of the conversation, but I think that when this was written, angst was more of a sort of mysterious thing and I think that's the brilliance of this song. It's talking about something that not everybody talked about at that point."

"The Exterminating Angel is a surrealistic movie. It’s about a bunch of people from high society in Mexico who, after one night at the opera, decide to have drinks in the house of one of them, and they cannot get out. And they spend about three months there, and you don’t know why they cannot get out, but they cannot. [Laughs] It’s a very, very beautiful and interesting story — also risky, and very misunderstood at the time that the movie opened. But you know, that’s what happened sometimes; after the second World War, naturalism and realism won the battle, so it was imposed that cinema had to be realistic always. But there was a time that it was not like that; Russians were doing expressionist movies, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for example in Germany, and all these German directors, they were doing another type of approach to movies in formal terms. And in Spain, too, we had Luis Bunuel who was doing this type of surreal movies that were very interesting. Now they can be revised in sort of a different way, with time passed. But Luis Bunuel is definitely one of my favorite directors of all time."