I was adopted by a Salvadorian mother and a white father. Growing up having complete identity crisis. Then my search for my mother and trying to find out why I was given up, and how could a mother give up a child, then finding out the circumstances of my birth was pretty traumatizing.

Beyond the Lights' was my fourth film. I gained a lot of knowledge, and I'm excited to share that with young filmmakers because I know how lost I was coming out of film school with that question of 'What's next?'

Talent has no gender. People are hiring young male directors right out of film school, off of a student film or off of a film at Sundance for millions of dollars. You can do the same with a female. It's not a risk about the work if you respect the film that they made.

There's a great deal of women in film school. I was not the only woman in my class at UCLA. When I went through the Sundance program, it was half women and half men.

I went through a stage of writing my cramped hand in tiny books. My two sisters and I did have our Bronte period. My mum is from Yorkshire, and we would go up to the Moors. It tapped into our romantic visions of ourselves.

I'm not a big fan of romantic comedies, believe it or not.

The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality.

We both came from families in which parents got married, had children and the whole thing. So we were not the kind of people to live together permanently.