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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.
Debra Granik
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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?
Debra Granik
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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.
Debra Granik
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I come from what they call the land of nowhere. I'm from the suburb. It's extremely atomizing.
Debra Granik
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I'd love to do a comedy - something where a character has to use humor to navigate the absurdities of life.
Debra Granik
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There has to be a continuation of the communal experience of filmgoing.
Debra Granik
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It's almost like Time's Up allowed some really good old-school players to stand up and say, 'We're actually just really normal companies that want to facilitate culture-making. Some of us are even in it for the slow returns.'
Debra Granik
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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.
Debra Granik
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American film isn't just film and glamor and fame and the lives of people who are fortunate financially. Those aren't the only stories in this vast nation. That's my mandate.
Debra Granik
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Films set in 90210 are ten a penny. But there's rarely room to make films about a different postal code, to show the lives of ordinary Americans who have to live with very limited material resources.
Debra Granik
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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.
Debra Granik
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Social realism takes research.
Debra Granik
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What does it really mean to have something change in you very late in your life, after you've structured your life in a different way? What does it mean to be someone who has had a history of sometimes reckless living, and then to really want to change yourself?
Debra Granik
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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.
Debra Granik
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Emerging actors know there's a whole lot to learn each time they are spending with someone who's done a lot.
Debra Granik
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I feel as though perhaps there's not a great match between the content I'm attracted to and the content that is considered attractive to some of the more major or more traditionally financed entities.
Debra Granik
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The time that it takes to make the feature is really contingent on the feature being sort of almost ready-made - so coming to a book is more ready-made. You at least have the story that someone sorted out.
Debra Granik
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When I read Daniel Woodrell's novel 'Winter's Bone,' I was drawn to the characters, the setting, and the sound of the dialog.
Debra Granik
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We just started filming 'Stray Dog' really close to the finishing of 'Winter's Bone,' down in Southern Missouri.
Debra Granik
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I don't want to make fictional characters who are perfect - that's a vanilla situation - but the fact is you are allowed to more carefully select and curate what it is you're going to explore.
Debra Granik
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I'm interested in the lives of Americans for whom the ways this culture has tried to define itself - that is, self-esteem defined by material wealth - they have nothing to do with that.
Debra Granik
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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.
Debra Granik
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I'm someone who's always looking for hope - if there's a ray of hope, a shrapnel, shred, a flake of hope - because I take the misfortune or hard times of others very seriously.
Debra Granik
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There's a lot of journalism about poverty, but sometimes it just helps to see that there's a real person who becomes a real mom, who is working with unsustainable wages that could eventually destroy her.
Debra Granik
