Zoe Saldaña: "Give Me That Camera!" — She Shares Her Directing Dreams at Locarno

What's next for Zoe Saldaña, who has starred in franchises like "Star Trek," "Guardians of the Galaxy," and "Avatar," won an Oscar for "Emilia Perez," and become the highest-grossing actor of all time?

"I feel like I can only watch other people direct for so long before I say, 'Give me that camera!'" Saldaña told audiences at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. "Because we women always think we're right, and half the time we are. So I want to prove myself."

Accepting the festival's Pardo alla Carriera honorary award from festival director Giona Nazzaro, the actress covered ground from her childhood split between New York and the Dominican Republic to the third season of Taylor Sheridan's "Lioness" and the fourth "Avatar" film.

She described the culture shock of her childhood this way: "Being uprooted from a culture like New York, where you meet the world right on your street, was very hard for us. Then I moved to a small island with a single religion, a single way of being; the growing pains were huge, but so was the growth."

Saldaña, who initially trained in ballet, says she was steered away from that path because of her "wrongly shaped feet": "You need to have the right arch. And only Russian women are born with that grace; you're told that your whole life." Still, that experience of discipline and exclusion became a source of the empathy she brings to her sci-fi roles: "I have a lot of experience feeling isolated and like an outsider. Maybe that's why, when I look at a woman like Neytiri or Gamora, I can put so much more of myself into them."

She also described what directors like James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, and Gore Verbinski have in common: "They looked into my eyes and I felt they truly saw an artist. They saw me as an equal artist, not as a man, or another woman, or someone white or Black."

Saldaña also spoke about a project she wants to direct herself: a family drama set in postwar San Francisco, following a traumatized veteran and the wife who suspects her husband is gay. "I've never seen this theme told through the eyes of a family of color," she said. "If no one else is doing it, one day I'd like to be the director who tells this story."