Debra Granik Quotes
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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.
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I'm always searching to learn more about our large and diverse country.
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You can't just pill away injuries that go deep in someone. They don't just stop those feelings from existing.
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It can't change anything immediately, but films can absolutely be catalysts for conversation.
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I feel like reality TV has thrown a difficult wrench in the system - on the programming and making side, and on the curating side - which is that we now have a higher threshold for the salacious. We have a higher threshold, unprecedented, for fast, cheap, and out of control.
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We're always on the search for a novel or a source or an existing screenplay, or writing something ourselves that turns us on. But because films cost a lot of money to make and a huge amount of effort to get the people to rally, you have to really like it; you can't just semi-like it. Getting to 'really like' is the part that takes the minute.
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Time's up on cheesy, lesser, boring roles for females in the stories that we try to tell.
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It's risky to show poor Americans. People see it as a downer. But I really wanted to make a tightly wound piece of storytelling that also happened to explode the myth of American affluence.
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Stereotypes are convenient. And yet within them, everyone will say there's something that - you know, they don't come for no reason. It's just that it takes time to explore complexity.
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There's a period where you feel very hinky and low about yourself, like, 'That was a lot of time, and there's nothing to show for it.' I've tried to tell myself that if you're going to be a filmmaker, you can't really talk like that about time, because you'll hate yourself or feel very worthless.
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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.
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No one has a green light when they start a documentary - not ever.
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I'm always looking for instances of people doing things for and with each other for pleasure, for passion, for camaraderie, from kindness. It's the anthropology of people figuring how to punctuate life with the lyrical.
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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.
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There is a porous membrane between a documentary that doesn't use interviews and what you would call a neorealist hybrid film.
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The protagonist in 'Winter's Bone' was a really good role for a female. She was strong; she didn't have to conform to something or be a sidekick to any man. That's part of what you're responding to; it's a woman-centric situation. Her value in the film was not reliant on any man.
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Sometimes I struggle with being American.
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Action films don't speak to me, because that's not my skill set. I also have a lot of stipulations about stories I don't want to perpetuate, ones that bring me down or make me feel like life's not worth living.
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People need meeting places. You need places where ideas get exchanged and you see each other's faces once in a while.
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For documentaries, I think streaming plays an amazing role, but it's a problem when the one service you initially relied on to have an incredible buffet - 'Come and see a lot of world cinema, and the lives of ordinary people as well' - all of a sudden is narrowed down until it's just gladiator after gladiator - and bloodlust.
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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.
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It's kind of a test when you read a novel thinking about its potential for the screen: How does it play on your mind's screen?
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My ego is one thing. Of course I want people to like what I do. Of course. There's no doubt. You wouldn't do it. But I think what people don't fully know is how responsible you feel for so many entities. So many hardworking people who've collaborated.
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The process of starting up a new film is one of looking through a lot of material and trying to find something you really like. And it does sometimes take a minute.