Now I find seriousness to be rather ridiculous.

I wasn't perfect and didn't have it together. I felt alone. So through acting, I decided to be a shape shifter and with every role become the character instead of being myself. It meant about 10 years of no one knowing I was the same person in every movie.

I started watching so many different types of women, saw all the complexities of them, all the ways and the look and shapes they could be, and I felt it was missing for me in American film. I didn't see anybody I was watching in movies that felt like me. I felt rather tortured and lonely about it.

Growing up, I just loved movies. It was how I saw the world, which I wanted to learn more about.

I didn't want to just watch a woman who was getting it right all the time. We're not perfect.

I'm 25. I'm a white, blonde girl in the entertainment industry - it's so easy to fall into a world of pleasing everyone. I feel more comfortable showing all these odd angles to myself.

What 'Short Term 12' did was it gave me the confidence to explore my intuition more. The healing process that came for me for making that movie and then sharing it with people - I was able to see, first hand, that movies can have a healing power and they can teach us things.

As an adult, there are technical aspects of filmmaking you understand, like having to pick up a cup on the same line every time.

I didn't realise how hard it was to be a mom and keep it all together.

When you eliminate all stimuli, your brain is like, 'Finally, we've got some space! I want to talk with you about something!'

When I was younger, watching movies, it felt like everything was glossy and beautiful, and I didn't really relate to it.

I'm always interested in whatever I can do to not look at my phone.

There were times my mom and I butted heads - over my curfew, over something like that. Whenever we would hit these moments of emotional backfire, she would say, 'You just don't understand what it's like to be a mother... I could never handle losing you.' I was like, 'OK, but just, like, chill out.'

A lot of stuff I was reading in mythology was about how women used to be taught to be wild. The wild woman was an essence that existed in the world. We're still coming back from many years of us being chiseled out to be identical and quiet.

I'd say there's more of a difference between a play and movie to TV than there is between TV and movies. But there's something involved in the repetition of things that require something different from me in order to sign onto a script.

My number-one website is brainpickings.org. It opens you up to different authors and gives insights into the literary world. Reading about the love letters novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote to his wife Vera blew my mind. Fascinating.

Laughter is the best way to get over something or get closer to something. It's one of the things I respect most about Amy Schumer. She's found a way to get us closer to ourselves and see the ugly side of humanity, but not in a way that's pointing a finger or that's angry. She does it in a way that makes us see the absurdity and laugh at it.

I am becoming more recognisable in some ways, and some aspects of my privacy are going. But there's an upside: I have more opportunity to tell bigger stories and connect with more people. And I really relish that responsibility.

I think my mystery, or any person's mystery, is the thing that makes them most interesting. I try to be as conscious as possible of keeping that alive.

I'm just interested in all of the different ways that a woman can be. We don't have enough, when it comes to American film, that shows all of the different complexities and ways that a woman is interesting and mysterious and dynamic and really complicated.

I'm really interested in mythology and folklore. I'm interested in moralities, why we're here, faith... all of these bigger questions that I think we can place in films that allow us to question and give us a safe place to feel. Those types of questions can pop up in all sorts of different types of films - drama, comedy, action movie.

It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of focus and dedication to do a film, and it's just not worth it if you're going to be miserable for even a day.

I've always felt like I've had the ability to choose which roles I was going to play. I don't think that the industry agreed with me, but I've always had a bit of a headstrong attitude of only doing the things that I really believe in and want to explore.

If you're in somebody's head for 12 hours a day for four weeks, it's like your brain actually wires itself to start thinking that way.