The people I know who suffer from mental illness, sometimes they do connect you to what it is to be really human. There's a vulnerability there, there's something very potent.

I know people for whom the search for how to be well has been a positive journey. It's empowering to face your issues and try and take care of yourself. It can be positive too.

It's very painful to love someone who is wrestling with either an addiction or a mental illness because you want the best for them. And it seems so hard, and it's frustrating.

When you make a movie, it's a movie, and things change based on who you put in the movie. And so it's, you know, obviously not exactly your life, but I feel that I did learn a lot about my parents.

Seeing movies about mental illness, a lot of falseness has leapt out at me over the years... So I just focused on what I remembered, the real experience of seeing somebody like that. And as an adult, I’ve had family members who are bipolar, so I’ve seen it again.

It’s good to have obstacles and difficulties, and to fail and have things not go the way you want. And then have to figure out how to keep moving forward.