Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
This industry is all about work, and just because Sundance exposed me to the world, it is my job to stay deserving in that world. The work never ends; the hustle just get harder, and you get stronger!
Sundance is incredible and has been very important for my career as a filmmaker, but it's also not the only route to success. There are a ton of great movies that don't get in and go on and do wonderfully.
I've been able to carve out spaces for myself. At Sundance, I'm in the mountains - my property is private. I get on a horse and ride for three, four hours. Sometimes five. I get lost. But when I'm in, I'm in.
What's so great about Sundance is that they only accept such a small handful of films per year for dramatic competition, so you know when you're going to Sundance that you're going to see top-quality projects.
There's only three movies I've been involved with in my whole life that I really care about. 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' was one, and 'Princess Bride' was the second, and 'Hearts in Atlantis' is the third.
I'll never get another first premiere again, especially at Sundance. I've just been trying to fully engage myself in everything that's going on, and I hope to see other movies here while I'm here! I really want to!
I know there's a certain love and affection for the homemade on the Internet, and I'm all for that, too, and I appreciate it in alternative music, and I appreciate it in B-movies and in Sundance, independent films.
As an actor and as a person you come together with being in familiar territory although that has not been my whole life. That's been a part of it. I think a lot of people associate me with the west because of Sundance.
There's a big difference between the independent film world and the Hollywood film world, and I don't know that I understood that until I got into certain rooms, and people's faces go blank when you talk about Sundance.
I took all my TV experience and what I learned about - by writing and directing and bringing a movie to Sundance - about the realities of the independent film market: 'Transparent' is the marriage of those two situations.
Filmmakers are always in a bubble; along with our crew or writer, we don't really get to socialize with other filmmakers, so the great thing about Sundance is you can see many other filmmakers doing the same thing you do.
Sundance is such an acquisition-frenzied, industry-centric experience, and at SXSW, many of the movies have distribution. And the focus is more on positioning the movie as opposed to selling them. People are more relaxed.
It never ceases to surprise me, the people I get to work with. I'm in a French film with Sandrine Bonnaire? I adore Sandrine Bonnaire. I'm doing a picture for Robert Redford? The Sundance Kid? I have to pinch myself sometimes.
I really unfortunately don't have tons of hilarious Sundance stories, because really I am not the biggest fan of hanging out, but the reason why is because I never go see other people's movies and I think that's the way to do it.
When I graduated from Brown after majoring in women's studies, I made my first PBS documentary, 'Women of Substance.' My first feature documentary was called 'American Hollow,' which I did for HBO and was at the Sundance Film Festival.
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.
A definite highlight was doing 'The Brothers McMullen.' Shooting that movie was such a joy - and then we wound up winning the Sundance Film Festival. That big-break moment is visceral. It happens once in a decade, maybe once in a lifetime.
There is nothing I can do about this stuff and I am pretty well ok with the fact that I think Sundance is not going to be stopped by it, because he Festival is itself now, and doesn't need me out there to talk about it like I did years ago.
I can't wake up every day and not thank Sundance. They're a great beacon of light for any independent film. Just to have a film that you made shown on a screen for an audience in a theater is beyond me, so I owe them everything in the world.
For me, Sundance always felt big. It's not the only way to make your way, but for me, it was definitely that critical link between struggling artist, kind of working on my own, to actually working professionally and being connected and being seen.
I thought I was depressed because I wasn't a writer/director. I moved into a space where I'm a writer/director, my movie is a hit at Sundance, I have a wonderful, loving boyfriend, and wow, I have financial stability. Why can't I get out of bed still?
With 'Poison,' I'm sure some people just hated the movie, but it also got caught up into a debate about arts funding because it was a film that received a National Endowment for the Arts Public Grant, and it won the prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
I've been to Sundance eight times as a publicist and thought I was very prepared. I mean, who could've been more prepared for me? A publicist who's been there eight times. Getting there as a filmmaker was a completely surreal, different, unexpected experience.
When I went to Sundance back in 1998, indie film was all the rage, and Miramax was throwing down five or six million dollars for several films each year. Those were the salad days of indie film, and those days are over. I'm not out there worrying too much about it.
You show a movie to your friends when you're working on it, but you don't have any real objectivity. You just don't know. So that moment when it's shown for the very first time at Sundance, it's just terrifying. I'm so anxious. And then every screening is different.
Talent has no gender. People are hiring young male directors right out of film school, off of a student film or off of a film at Sundance for millions of dollars. You can do the same with a female. It's not a risk about the work if you respect the film that they made.
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.
Getting into Sundance is a certain sort of passport to a level of anxiety I've never experienced, even having had a baby in the NICU for a week. For about ten minutes, you're a world-class director. Then you become an entry-level, harried, low level concierge with absolutely no juice.
I play the guitar. This year at the Sundance film festival, I joined the band from 'The Guitar' on stage. We warmed up for Patti Smith, and then the director Michel Gondry got on the drums to play some songs from the soundtrack to his film Be Kind Rewind with Mos Def. It was pretty mad.
Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies and directed by Sundance nominee James Ponsoldt, 'The End of the Tour' is a terrific film, among the year's best with its two-man tarantella of wall-to-wall talk - and I watched it through my fingers as though it were Mad Max.
'Diary of a Teenage Girl' was my first American movie. It was my first movie in an American accent. It's based on a graphic novel, which was written in 2002 by someone called Phoebe Gloeckner. It was turned into a play by Marielle Heller, who then wrote it as a screenplay for Sundance Labs.
If you go to Sundance, the experience that I've had there as a viewer is... there's like a hundred movies there, and you've got to figure out what movies are sold out, what can you see. Sometimes you go to see movies that you don't know anything about because it just works into your schedule.
To win Best Director at Sundance was beyond anything I could have imagined for myself. It's still an incredible feeling to know I won. But as happy as I am about winning, I also know many other women of color have directed amazing films over the years that were equally deserving and didn't win.
Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel first championed my film, 'Hoop Dreams,' which was essential to its success. Roger remained a great supporter of my work throughout my career, and I'll never forget him tweeting about 'The Interrupters' right before its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011.
It took Cianfrance 12 years to bring 'Blue Valentine' to the screen after he first conceived it. He found Gosling and Williams early on, and they hung in there with him. The film finally premiered at Sundance 2010, then screened at Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival before landing in theaters in December.
I think it took me seven years before I got the script for 'Frozen River.' That's the movie I had been looking for my whole career. When I read that, I knew I had to shoot that movie - that it'd be a game-changer. It was one of those scripts where I read it, and I was like, 'This movie could get into Sundance.'
I remember when I was at the first showing of 'John Dies at the End' at Sundance, and I was talking to some of the people in the standby crowd who were outside and didn't have tickets. They were just waiting in line to see if they could get in. It was this whole gang of die-hard sci-fi wacko people, and they were just fantastic.
Pirates are the very essence of profit maximising entrepreneurs described in neoclassical economics. Yet, whilst films such as 'The Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' have gone a long way to popularise both pirates and outlaw behaviour, the truth of the matter is that piracy is illegal, and it kills.
When I was working for Miramax, before Sundance, a videotape of 'The Blair Witch Project' - of the full, completed movie - went to a lot of the buyers. And so we all saw it before the festival, and I passed, a bunch of people passed... Then I watched the movie marching toward success, and was reminded by my bosses what a dope I was.
