Sometimes I think about how Jennifer Lopez was snubbed for an Oscar nomination for Hustlers and I get mad all over again. Like… how did that happen? Be real – J.Lo was excellent in Hustlers, she put the film together, she produced it and it’s a film about working class minority women. That film deserved a lot more love. Anyway, I thought about all of that as I read J.Lo’s excellent Elle Magazine cover profile, one of many for Elle’s Women in Hollywood issue. This is not an interview where Jen talks about love or Ben Affleck – she’s talking about her business, what she’s learned throughout her professional life and what more there is to do. Some highlights:

She’s not interested in just producing rom-coms: “I want to tell the gamut of stories. Uplifting, empowering stories, and entertaining stories, and gangster movies. I want to do everything that men do. I want to do all of it.” She doesn’t like the notion that women only want to see love stories or romantic comedies. “I think that’s insulting.” Women, she points out, “have been leaders of countries. We have run empires; we have done all of these things throughout history, and we should tell all of those stories.”

The drive to do these things: “When people ask me, ‘How do I do this? How do I get into this?’ I think to myself, ‘You’re not going to do this.’ Because if you’re going to do this, there is a drive within you that will find a way and you don’t need anybody to tell you, ‘You should do this, or you should do that.’ That’s not how it goes. It’s just knocking on the wall and finding a way. When people ask that question, I go, ‘This person probably is looking for a shortcut.’ There is no one sure way to become an actor or start making music. People fall into it in different ways, in their own time.

She loves to mentor: “But I do like mentoring. I like sharing the experience that I have. When I work with younger actors and I see them banging their head up against the wall, really trying to make this moment work, it’s just like: The most important thing you can do right now is relax. Let’s just be, let’s just live. You start off and you have all of these ambitions: ‘I’m going to be the greatest actor of all time and I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that.’ You can and you will, but how you become that is to relax into it and understand that you know what you’re doing and that you’ve put in the work. The more relaxed, the more aware I can be, the better.”

Telling women’s stories: “People were laying the groundwork for this for a long time. It’s just that sometimes it takes time to move these mountains and these old ideas and paradigms and shift them to a place where there’s real change. We have been able to stand in our own power and say, We’re not going to be taken advantage of. We’re not just on the corners of life or on the outside of the stories. We are the stories.”

Learning as she went along: “One of those things was to be more particular with my choices. And I didn’t have that luxury, being Latina. I didn’t get called in for everything someone who wasn’t Latina would get called in for. I got called in for very specific things. As I started getting more leads here and there, I should have pulled back. I took that mindset with me instead of going, ‘I should only work with certain kinds of directors that I really want to work with. I should choose this material in a different way.’ I just wasn’t as particular as I could be, I think. And if I [could] start over, I think I would’ve done that. I would’ve known that the director is really the helm of the project when you’re acting. Just like in singing, the producers you work with are very important. I knew that with music, but I didn’t quite understand it as much when I was younger about directors.”

Working as a woman over the age of 50: “It has changed a lot, and I think it’s appropriate. As you get older and you have more experience, you become a richer human being and you have more to offer. The idea of, ‘There’s nothing really valuable about watching a woman over 30’ is so ridiculous, it’s the opposite of right. It just makes me laugh. People have realized that women just get sexier as they get older. They get more learned and more rich with character. All of that is very beautiful and attractive, and not just physically, but on the inside, the beauty that you gain as you get older, the wisdom you gain. I see myself working [as long as] I want to. I don’t know what that age is. It might be 70, it might be 80, it might be 90, I don’t know. But I know that it’s there for me if I want it and I want to create it. That has always been the mindset that I’ve had: to never let anybody put me in a box because of where I was born, where I’m from, what age I am, anything like that. Those boundaries don’t exist for me.”

[From Elle]

She’s right about wanting to see women over 30 on screen. Maybe I was always like that, but I never felt like “oh, I don’t want to watch older women.” It’s always been about the stories, and for so many years, Hollywood simply didn’t prioritize any female stories, much less stories involving women over the age of 30. I like what she says about rom-coms too – that she didn’t become a producer just to make rom-coms, that women can play leaders and gangsters and strippers and hustlers and everything else. I love that she scoffs at the rom-com paradox.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, cover courtesy of Elle.