Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Social realism takes research.
A role is never just a ready-made thing.
Film is a team thing. There is no auteur.
Humour is the be-all and end-all medicine of human existence.
No one has a green light when they start a documentary - not ever.
In Hollywood, only a female who's massively damaged is interesting.
I'm always searching to learn more about our large and diverse country.
There has to be a continuation of the communal experience of filmgoing.
I find it so hard to make films about my own region, but it could happen.
The immigration process is so unbelievably complicated and expensive and endless!
I need and want to see capable women. I don't like to see them weep all the time.
It's funny: your happiness is contingent on a bigger picture besides just yourself.
Humour is used in struggle and solving difficult things, and I relish that tradition.
Time's up on cheesy, lesser, boring roles for females in the stories that we try to tell.
I come from what they call the land of nowhere. I'm from the suburb. It's extremely atomizing.
I will always face the conundrum that the subjects I'm attracted to aren't essentially commercial.
I swing with a lot of torque from non-fiction to fiction, and I really like that place in between.
I'm from the East Coast, and so therefore, the Pacific Northwest forest is very exotic land to me.
We need cultural awareness and a cooperative approach with other countries versus a dominating approach.
You can't make movies without known names, and unknowns can't become known, because they can't get work.
I'd love to do a comedy - something where a character has to use humor to navigate the absurdities of life.
Emerging actors know there's a whole lot to learn each time they are spending with someone who's done a lot.
You can't just pill away injuries that go deep in someone. They don't just stop those feelings from existing.
We just started filming 'Stray Dog' really close to the finishing of 'Winter's Bone,' down in Southern Missouri.
There are documentaries that will just save your life and be the conduit to the art form you started out loving.
For whole swaths of people, that map of, 'Come along this way, come to college, do this and that,' isn't offered.
People need meeting places. You need places where ideas get exchanged and you see each other's faces once in a while.
When I read Daniel Woodrell's novel 'Winter's Bone,' I was drawn to the characters, the setting, and the sound of the dialog.
There is a porous membrane between a documentary that doesn't use interviews and what you would call a neorealist hybrid film.
In documentary, mostly, people are going to say untoward things; people are going to have gnarly beliefs. People aren't perfect.
I always think that my assignment is to seek out stories that are experienced by people who don't get the ticket for Easy Street.
My producing partner and I were shown a novel we really liked. It was called 'My Abandonment' by Peter Rock, and we enjoyed reading it.
Some people have these small, positive schemes for survival, a kind of strength that I am attracted to, maybe because I'm prone to the blues.
I get very caught up in the day-to-day and immersed in the scenes as they unfold. It's harder for me, as I'm filming, to see the larger story.
All filmmakers want the option to make another film, to have it not always be such an uphill battle - for it to be our life, our working life.
When men's lives become extremely hard, women learn how to deal with them and assist them but also develop quiet systems of coping and managing.
The struggle to have a living wage doesn't come easy. You're ready to work, you want it, you seek it... but it's not like it's just given to you.
A big part of the equation for 'Winter's Bone' was making it for so little that we owe nobody. We had a guaranteed loan and were able to pay it back.
You will never go wrong with actually photographing process. It's primitive. Humans love to see the bipedal animal in us finish things. We just like it!
The challenge for me is to make sure I've done my work. To make sure not every scene is quiet, that other scenes rise up, that there's different tension.
It's been a pleasure to see female comedians be prominent and flourish - like Kate McKinnon's Rudy Giuliani impressions, which are uncanny in their precision.
Sometimes you get ensnared by an idea, and it's what I call 'the sticky burr': You go hiking, and a burr sticks to you, and that's the film you're going to make.
There are so many American experiences that we can't know about unless we venture out to create a dialogue, to observe, ask questions, and stay there for a while.
The Oscars have always been an arena in which very commercial films are recognised, and I don't mean that in a bitter way; I just didn't ever look in that direction.
When I'm interested in an aspect of someone's life, I want to ask about their experiences, their survival strategies, and what they do to keep their lives interesting.
The questions that loom can be intimidating. 'What kind of moves is she gonna make? What is she gonna do?' There is this pressure that you're supposed to keep impressing.
In the U.K., working-class lives are depicted with the characters' humour, but in the U.S., people with difficulties are often depicted with pious or simply dreary lives.
I love to champion some of the hardworking actors where, it's been said to me, they don't bring money. But to me, they bring everything. They bring their wonderful selves.
I'm doing my best to stay off that financing scheme that relies on this one strip of capital, which is the red carpet. And - no sob story - but it's hard. It takes a while.
In documentary, you are sometimes burdened, or you feel very responsible for dealing with - I want to say - more complicated themes. Fiction allows for greater distillation.