Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's very difficult to figure out, for me, what stops really talented young female filmmakers from having the kind of careers that their really talented young male counterparts are having.
I do think there's a preoccupation that women understandably have with this idea of the roles we're meant to play and whether or not those roles serve us or ultimately kind of imprison us.
I'm very interested in dysfunction. I kind of realized in my first film that a character with so much rage that she didn't know where to put it was both heartbreaking and interesting to me.
'The Invitation' is a meditation on grief and loss carried within a suspense drama. At its core, it's about a dinner party gone horribly wrong and about the consequences of denying our pain.
One of the uncertain pleasures of adulthood, for me, has really been about confronting how little I know about the world and how much completely baffles me about the world and human behavior.
I have had to really grapple with the fact that, while I wish things could be different at times, I ultimately needed to experience the transformation that comes with pain and loss and sorrow.
I want people to leave the theater wrestling with the idea that our pain - physical, emotional, and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed, or "fixed."
I'd like to be making more films more frequently, but I do find that making movies, for me, has proven to be an extremely challenging road. No movie is easy; no movie has come together quickly.
I just know I have so much to teach my child. And I just feel kind of like, what would our world be without mothers? What would our world be without mother love? I don't think we'd have a world.
I guess because there aren't many women working in the kind of variety of spaces that I've had the opportunity and privilege to kind of work in, that there is this extreme scrutiny about my career.
I get why we don't want to be in pain, but there's something very essential about what happens when we're in pain and some of the growth that can come from it if we stare at it straight in the face.
I don't think I could have had a better experience than I did with 'Girlfight.' It was a humbling experience to be so well received. And it was equally humbling to be ripped to pieces with 'Aeon Flux.'
I would love to make lighter entertainments that have you sort of hopping and skipping and jumping out of the theater, but part of me just doesn't know how much I believe in that, as much as I want to.
It is important to know what audiences might expect from their genre movies, but I think it is also important to not give them everything they want. As a viewer, I think it can get pretty boring that way.
There's no glory in climbing a mountain if all you want to do is to get to the top. It's experiencing the climb itself - in all its moments of revelation, heartbreak, and fatigue - that has to be the goal.
Sometimes evil is in the form of a malignant clown, and sometimes evil is in the form of policy and legislators, and sometimes it's a grinning death mask and it has something more viscerally terrifying about it.
Along with loving the script, the reason I did 'Aeon Flux' was because I needed the job, and I couldn't find $5 million to make a movie independently - after making a fairly successful movie for a million dollars.
For better and for worse, I feel like sorrow and grief are really transformative personal experiences for me, and I question what I would be had I decided to take a different path and not embrace that kind of pain.
The nice thing about movies is that you can sort of steer your audience toward seeing that there's discomfort, but there's also this sense of, 'Well, we'll tolerate this weirdness because maybe it'll be interesting.'
I think we forget that part of parenthood means having to face and reject or face and embrace a kind of animal capacity for unkindness. And if, when, parents do embrace that, it reveals something very ugly to oneself.
I think the crux of this urgent and real conversation about representation and diversity in art-making and storytelling both behind and in front of the camera ultimately has to do with simply seeing more human perspectives.
For me, I guess I feel like the notion of 'feel good' entertainment... I'm all for it, but I just think you really, really, really have to earn it. I'm not sure I have a lot of movies in me where I see a world that earns it.
It's extremely instructive to realize that you cannot do everything. You need to delegate, to find experts, to consult with them. A big part of the job of directing is knowing when to take something on and when you shouldn't.
Horror, almost better than any of the other genres, pits the will to live against the will toward nihilism. I just think that's worth exploring. I don't know what is more important, actually, to explore than that very dynamic.
We have to accept that making movies is a never-ending process of occasional progress, frequent setbacks, and unexpected curveballs being thrown our way. Navigating that process requires stamina, curiosity, openness, and creative fire.
To me, the thing that sets us apart from so many other animal species is our ability to ask questions, investigate, gather information, come to our own conclusions, and sometimes depart from the pack, sometimes move away from the tribe.
Polanski is a great example of a person whose personal life clearly has been just fraught with scandal and transgression and criminal acts. And yet, in 'Rosemary's Baby,' I think he's made one of the crowning feminist statements in film.
To me, sound is a crucial component to, really, any moviegoing experience, but particularly with suspense films or thrillers. I think you need the audience to become subtly really attuned to the soundscape in, like, this uncomfortable way.
I'm just hoping that as I get older, and as more and more movies get made by female directors, what we start to see is how, in the same way good male directors get a shot at creating interesting male and female characters, women do as well.
I don't want to make studio films if I am constantly fighting to assert some kind of leadership within the process. I'm not hired to be a really nice person who comes up with solutions to problems now and then. I'm hired to be the director.
It's freeing to be able to consistently make creative decisions and ask creative questions of the team without feeling like, 'Does this make me vulnerable to getting canned?' That's a big part of being in a studio - they can always fire you.
It's pretty gratifying to spend so long to make your first film and then feel like it got a lot of love - that was an incredible feeling. But there's something very distorting about that much attention. It felt like such a double-edged sword.
One of the things you hear about when studying the nature of fanaticism is that a lot of the time, people don't start as fanatics. They shift and evolve into that state. That's a process, a systematic process of losing your identity and sense of self.
Somehow, even though you have less time and less money, the thing about making indie films is somehow you have another kind of resource: a human resource, where you can really look to your creative colleagues and actually ask questions that are honest.
The best horror walks a line that's completely on a psychological level, not needing the typical tropes of traditional horror filmmaking, then also having to tease out those elements in a way that makes the audience feel like they know what they're in.
Sometimes you realize that the thing an actor is asking for isn't exactly the thing they want. Maybe they're asking for more dialogue, or maybe they want a deep intellectual exploration of their role. But probably what they really need is encouragement.
That complacency and that willingness to give yourself over to a larger power structure is how civilizations destroy themselves. And I just hope people wake up from the slumber they've willed themselves to. Because we're really in a dark place right now.
The short form, for those people who can master it - and I am by no means one of them - it is very admirable, because it is really hard to tell stories that can stick with the audience and still be between 5 and 30 minutes long. I think it's a real challenge.
I don't necessarily believe that stories need closure. I just believe they need a beginning, middle, and end, but the end doesn't have to prevent us from continuing to grapple with the story at hand. It ideally should demand that we remain engaged with the story.
Day-to-day concerns really trumped big dreams for quite a while in my life. I was so freaked out about money. And until, honestly, I was in my early thirties and made 'Girlfight,' that anxiety was a real issue: How are you going to live? How are you going to survive?
I've been asked countless times, 'Why are you drawn to horror films? Why do you think women are drawn to horror films?' And it's because, in a way, it's one of the few genres that tells it like it is. A lot of times, women do feel like they're running for their lives somehow.
Reading the script for 'Jennifer's Body,' I just thought that here was a script that really exposes the horror between girls and friendships. I always sort of approached the film with that in mind first, and then thought about the crazy ways that that horror would express itself.
I want to make big movies - but I don't want to have to die a little death every single time I do. Until I meet the people or the studio or the business people who will let me do things a little bit more the way that I need to do them, I probably shouldn't be making big studio movies.
The people in the decision-making positions need to be thinking differently about who to hire, and looking more unsparingly at their choices. Why give this person a break over that person? Why give this person a second chance over that person? I do think that's where gender comes into play.
I assumed a business like a film studio would behave like a business and still want to protect its own interests, still do the best it could to get as many people paying for as many of their movies as possible. I realized this is not actually a business about business: it's a business of egos and dominance.
Sci-fi and horror, particularly, allow a storyteller to depart from, let's say, the demands of cinema verite or kitchen-sink realism or, even, just relatable dramas and can go into areas that are either - in the case of horror - more primally effective or, in the case of sci-fi, more speculative or imaginative.
I think that idea that sort of our emotional self and our emotional life is a faucet that you turn on and off, and that we are in control of it entirely, that's a really appealing idea for a lot of people. But there are certainly the times where it's appealing to me, but it never quite works the way I hoped it would.
Always keep absorbing art and looking at paintings and reading books and watching movies in other languages, just getting to know the world at hand and the world of the past. It's important to keep absorbing the world and keep engaging with it, and often that means not thinking about movies and thinking about other things.
Making 'The Invitation' and waiting to make it on my terms and getting final cut and doing it the way I needed to do it was incredibly challenging, but it has really been so great for me. I'm so thankful that that's happened, that I got to work with actors I really like and have just such a good experience in delving into that story.
I think there is really something we need to examine about the notion of careers, and are women encouraged and given the same opportunities to have vital healthy careers in which they are challenged by certain things, they try new things, they struggle, maybe they stumble, maybe they fail, and then there's more room to succeed as well.