Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Actually, Nicole Holofcener's movies have always felt really right to me. 'Lovely & Amazing' is a movie about women's bodies that I feel is so truthful and painful and real.
My five-year-old, before the quarantine, joined a chess class in our neighborhood in Brooklyn, and my husband was learning to play so that they could play against each other.
It's funny because you start watching Mister Rogers so young, it's sort of in this subliminal part of your brain. I think that's why people have such a visceral reaction to him.
I remember the first time somebody classified me as a feminist. I was in fourth grade. And I remember thinking, 'Oh, is that what I am?' At the time, I just cared about equality.
Becoming a writer, and then a director, was taking my creative life in my own hands, and wanting to have stories that I wanted to put out into the world - and I have fallen in love with directing.
Part of what I loved about exploring Lee Israel was she was a woman who was often overlooked and judged. And it was fun to find all the ways that I could sympathise and feel as though I was like her.
I did not grow up in the 70s but in the 80s in the Bay Area, the child of hippies in Berkeley, so I felt connected to the place and the legendary things that had come before me historically that I'd missed.
One of the movies I know affected me was 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch.' I remember feeling like it was such a brave and scary and awesome movie, and it was so ambitious. I felt really connected to it emotionally.
I think there used to be more respect toward young people in movies. John Hughes really respects his characters and they're given their emotional weight. He does so even with kids, but especially with teenagers.
I feel some responsibility, being one of the few women directors who are being given opportunities. Sometimes, that makes me want to take on some big franchise because I want to show people that women can do it.
It makes white men uncomfortable that there aren't more stories about them because it somehow is perpetuating the idea that they aren't the center of the universe - and they wouldn't give up that position lightly.
I was so involved in my own life I wasn't even aware of what was happening in the outside world, but as I got older I was constantly reflecting back on my own teenagehood and feeling like I hadn't been represented.
It feels like there are two very different parts to making movies. There's the making of it and then there's the putting out of it - and I like the making of the movies a lot more than putting it out into the world.
But the idea behind French hours is that instead of doing a 12 and a half or 13-hour day with a lunch break in the middle, you do a 10-hour straight day. Everyone kind of eats food throughout the day anyway on the set.
With all of the bad things that are happening in the world right now, I think we need a message of togetherness and true unity. I believe that starts with personal reflection and then we can find kindness toward each other.
I was in theater school playing Lady Macbeth and doing these great dramatic parts, and then I got out into the real world and was auditioning for commercials, and just not getting to do anything that felt remotely meaningful.
I don't look like the way we've painted directors in our movies and everything since forever. I don't look like an old white guy in a baseball cap. So, yes, there are always moments when people are surprised that I'm the director.
The beauty of film is that you can get closer than you can in theater, you know? I come from theater, and I remember feeling like I was almost cheating when I would put the camera so close to somebody's face when I was filming them.
Scott Frank and I are director friends. We met through the Sundance Labs and he's advised me on my first projects - I've visited him on set, we've shared first cuts with each other, and we're more like director pals than anything else.
Mr. Rogers would not make a good protagonist of a narrative film. He's without conflict, he's too far along on his journey toward enlightenment to be a good protagonist. Our protagonists have to be struggling with demons in a certain way.
I think all the actors I've worked with knew that I was an actor. Like, I get into the dirt with my actors and we figure out the rhythm of the scene and how it needs to sound and what the blocking is, the way you would with another actor.
I was always seen as defiant. And I did know that as a kid. It just wasn't something that was stamped out of me. I often had problems in school where I would stand up to teachers or I would believe that something they were saying was wrong.
It's advice I always give to directors when they're starting out: Take an acting class to really see what it feels like to be an actor. And I have always felt like one of my strengths as a director is that I share a language and a vocabulary with actors.
In some ways the nudity really makes people feel more uncomfortable because it's not nudity that is just making bodies look like sexy little pieces of body parts stuck together. It's much more blunt and real and there is not a sexy soundtrack behind it all.
I come from the world of theater, and I know Noel Coward's writing well. He has such a specific voice, and was one of the wittiest writers who ever lived, and you think of him in the same category as someone like Shakespeare who's just impossible to imitate.
I remember thinking when I set out to direct my movie that it was all about lenses and the shots you were going to get. Really, directing is about tapping into what makes us the most human, telling stories, emotions, and managing a group of empathetic people.
I think acting helps me as a director no matter what. There is something about being reminded about the vulnerability it takes to be an actor and what I'm really asking of actors every day when I'm on set as a director that I think it's a really good reminder.
I don't think I would have made 'A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood' had Trump not been president. I felt so desperately like we needed to see a model of masculinity that was kind and loving and emotional, and could be the antidote to this president that we had.
I do think there's probably a little more opportunity to direct in television, because there are just so many TV shows. In movies, it still feels harder to break in. I do hope that's shifting. The difference between TV and miniseries and movies is also diminishing.
You live in an apartment in New York, and you think all the time about like, 'I don't even know who's living above me.' There are all these anonymous people in that window or that window or that window, and everybody has their own interesting life that I know nothing about.
I went to Sundance Labs, and I definitely watched my male peers from there have very different meetings than I was having, very different outcomes. You could tell there was a feeling that a young male director had this exciting potential and a young female director was risky.
I remember my grandmother's husband dying. But I think I was older. I think I was 7 or 8 when he died. But I remember that being the first real person I knew who died, and I - and that my parents didn't let me go to the funeral. And I remember feeling like it was really unfair.
I just don't want to ever make decisions based on something that I feel like I shouldn't do, or if it's a logical career step. It has to be something that inspires me. Because if it's not something that inspires me, then I'm not going to do it well. And that doesn't help anybody.
I never thought I was going to make a movie about men. I've always thought we don't have enough movies about women, and if I spent my whole life making movies only about women, there still wouldn't be enough movies about women, so that's a wonderful thing to dedicate my career to.
When you're directing, you look around and you think, everything I see is my responsibility. From the catering being on time to whether the clouds are moving the way I need them to move to whether this actor is giving the performance I want to whether the costumes are what they should be.
When I said yes to doing 'Queen's Gambit,' I was feeling burned out on directing and movie-wise wasn't sure what my next big project was going to be. So I said yes to doing this very different type of project that required a different skill set from me, sort of just to shake things up, if anything.
Showing a real human body and a woman who is looking at her body without shame - that alone is a radical notion. Showing a young woman who is honest about what she is experiencing and letting us into her most intimate, darkest thoughts, all of that is just promoting something that we don't get to see about young women.
Seeing yourself reflected on screen is a very important part of being human. It makes us feel less alone, it make us feel more connected to humanity. Women, gay men, and trans people for a long time have not seen themselves represented, so being able to show the complexities that we all have - just as complex stories as a heterosexual white male - is crucial for us to feel more human and have other people see us as human beings.