When I was doing Twilight there was a moment when it was snowing and hailing in the middle of the set and I couldn’t finish shooting the scene, so I went behind a tree and cried for like 30 seconds and came back and then went ‘right we’re going to do this and this’. On that film I never went over budget, never went over schedule, never fired people or yelled at people, nothing. But I get told that I’m emotional and difficult and cried on sets.” She laughs. “Listen I’ve been on sets where male directors have fired the crew, gone over schedule by a month, two months, even three, gone over budget by millions, come in unprepared, not even had a shot list, yelled and got into physical fights with people or, you know, brought hookers to set… No one says they’re difficult. Or I’ve also seen a big man, a former football player, who cried on set and you know what happened? People gave him a round of applause and said he’s so sensitive… If somebody says there’s not a gender bias, that there’s not a double standard, then they do not have their eyes open.”

“No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much.’ Considering the centuries of silence, the genres of writing that have been virtually the sole terrain of men, more contributions by women writers should be both encouraged and welcomed. As a professor I sit in classrooms year after year talking with young women who are uncertain about their voices, who are still grappling with whether they can become ‘authors.’ Many of these young women are afraid to speak, let alone write. When I witness their fear, their silences, I know no woman has written enough. Then there are the exceptional female students who are unable to complete their own writing, who are blocked when it comes to putting their visions on paper, who diligently write work for their male peers or older men who require assistance, yet these females remain too shy to claim their words. When I witness this self-betrayal, I know no woman has written enough.”

“You might also think that a director who made films with so much warmth, whose work is infused with such happiness and sorrow, must have had a contented life. The opposite was true. He was a chain-smoker, he was an alcoholic, he lived with his mother. His mother died about six months before he did. He never married, never had children. He lived for the cinema, and all he did was cinema. He didn’t really have any other life. He had a morbid cast of mind. On his tombstone he had a single Japanese kanji inscribed on it, and that kanji is mu, which means “the void” or “emptiness.”

… I came to realize that everything, particularly something as intimate as a meal, is a reflection of both a place’s history and its present political and military circumstances. In fact, the meal is where you can least escape the realities of a nation’s situation. People tend to be less guarded and more frank (particularly when alcohol is involved). What you are eating is always the end of a very long story–and often an ingenious but delicious answer to some very complicated problems.