Emily Mortimer in 'Doll & Em'; Emmy Awards; Toronto Film Festival

[It] almost went out of its way to peevishly spoil a great number of beloved dramas from the past few years. And that seemed to me so tone-deaf and almost openly hostile to the way audiences watch TV. As if, if you weren't watching those shows in the moment when they aired, you would never have another chance to. When in fact, they just spoiled the ending for people who [will] be discovering these shows for 10, 15, 20 years into the future.

The wage gap between men and women hired for major roles in Hollywood is still an issue. Wait, I'm sorry, I misread that. The age gap between men and women hired for major roles in Hollywood is still an issue. Wait I'm sorry, I misread it again. It's both. Still both.

Because it was sort of Viola Davis' words in practice. Regina King has been acting on TV in many things since she was a teenager on '227.' She's been perfectly fine — and quite good — in many things from '24' to 'Southland.' But until 'American Crime,' she's never really had the opportunity to be great."

One of the happily surprising films was "The Martian." This is that big-budget Ridley Scott movie. One of the few festivals where you'll see a giant budget movie like "The Martian" is Toronto. But based on Ridley Scott's recent track record, delivering movies like "Prometheus," I think everybody went in with reserved expectations. This, though, is an out-of-the-box pleasurable big studio hit and I think it could go far at the Oscars depending on how much traction it gets with audiences. 

Well, you'll recall Julianne Moore won best actress this past year. I don't think she's going to two-peat this year. Her big contender at Toronto was "Freeheld." It's a gay rights drama starring her and Ellen Page and, wow, I just don't know. It's a surprisingly disengaged, flat, uncomfortable performance from her. It just shows that as much Oscar buzz as you can amass going into Toronto, you can leave [the festival] with squat. 

The winner was "Room." This is a kidnap drama starring Brie Larson as a woman who's been imprisoned for years in a shed. She's even borne a child and she's trying to devise an escape to get both of them out. It's a really terrific movie, very good, very emotional — and I think that last thing is the key.

I think "Spotlight" is currently our best picture frontrunner. This is a movie about a team of Boston Globe reporters, including Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo, who uncover the staggering extent of misdeeds in the Catholic church in the early 2000's. Hearing that synopsis, you might think it's some sort of dry procedural. This is an incredibly smooth, pleasurable, watchable, even sometimes fun movie about putting together a story. It's incredibly done and I think a lot of Oscar voters will respond to it. 

Yeah, this movie is called "Anomalisa." It's written and directed by Charlie Kaufman who was the writer behind classic oddball movies like "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation." It is a stop-motion animated film about a motivational speaker in an anonymous hotel room in the Midwest who has a one night stand. It is definitely unusual — and even more unusual than the movie is that Paramount bought it in a huge buy. 

You don't at all, but the very reason that it's that studio means they don't have a very stocked Oscar shelf at all. I think that they came there hungry for something they could push, otherwise there's a lot of people who will be sitting on their hands this season and that movie will need that help. 

I think they think that there's a young, hip audience that's gonna go for it. I did talk to another buyer who said that the young, hip audiences aren't that big. It's probably going to top out at four or five million, but I think that Paramount wanted to make a splash. They wanted to assert themselves in a certain way and they definitely did. 

The second season is in a way more subtle. There’s still the kind of psychodrama that happens between two people who love each other very much, who have a slightly, sort of co-dependent relationship. But there [are] other themes in the second season. There was the theme with the uneasy kind of relationship with feminism that women of our age sometimes have, or can have. That was something we felt like it would be good to be honest about because it’s a thorny subject and a difficult one to discuss— difficult in any arena apart from fiction, I find. There was something very cathartic about having these characters get very confused about what it is to be a, sort of, strong woman on the show. Whereas in real life it’s hard to have those conversations somehow because it’s such a political topic.

No, I don’t think we were on a crusade in any way to show how capable women are of doing things. It’s sort of more subtle than that. It’s grappling with the idea of being confident in yourself and not letting yourself down ... And there’s another element to the second season, another theme we were consciously bringing into it is a sort of expatriation thing going on. And part of Doll and Em’s confusion about what kind of women to be is the feeling that, back home, there isn’t a tradition of being strong confident women who are very easy talking about past same-sex relationships they may have had. [Women] who have a sort of a sexual confidence as well as an intellectual confidence. And in England we suffer from this terrible disease, you must have noticed, of sort of completely addictive modesty. And it’s very difficult to carry off being ambitious in England.

Definitely. In fact I can remember one of my first experiences of coming to L.A. and going to a Hollywood party. Alessandro, my husband, had gone to the loo or something. I was at the bar and there was this man and we were both getting a drink. He was a producer or something so he said, “What do you do?” And I said, “Oh I’m an actress.” And I was so embarrassed that I was telling this man that I was an actress. I felt like, gosh, that’s the most predictable thing I could be saying. I sort of wanted to make it more interesting or something. So then he said, “Really?” And I said, “Yes, but I’m not a good one.” I mean, I could see the wires inside his brain kind of fizz. It did not compute. He looked so confused and, sort of, panic stricken and he wanted to get very far away from me. Because I made this statement because that just didn’t make any sense.

I just said it to make him laugh. But I realized that kind of humor, that kind of self-deprecating humor, it just doesn’t compute here.

The fictional marriage we’ve created in the second season is kind of an amalgam of the marriages we both have and of other marriages we know of. But what we kept coming back to when we were writing it was that we don’t want there to be a goodie or a baddie in this marriage. You know, Em’s husband seems to be at home with the kids and you think, well, maybe he’s a stay-at-home husband. And then, as the season goes on, you start to reveal, no, he’s an artist himself. They’re both talking about how much they’ve done to contribute to the family ... and how many times they picked the children up from school that week. And that just seemed like very familiar territory for two working people who are married and bringing up children and both feeling both guilty and resentful about how much or how little they’re doing to contribute.

Yes, it really is. It’s very therapeutic. You know, I’ve just been doing a lot of press for this show in the last few days. But you know, it’s so much harder having conversations about what it is that you do than it is actually doing the thing that you do ... I’ve actually been having those conversations over and over again. You’re always asked what it’s like to balance work and family. You’re always asked about what it’s like to be a woman in Hollywood, a woman in the film business. You’re always asked about what it’s like to get older as a woman in the film business. But these are important questions and they’re ones that, of course, one is really thinking about and grappling with all the time. And so, to get the chance to really deal with them and deal with them in a kind of way that is comic and heightened, and kind of pull the rug out from underneath all of it, it’s great. It’s like an answer to all those questions that feels more satisfying than a sort of platitudinous soundbite in an interview.