Debra Granik Quotes
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I always think that my assignment is to seek out stories that are experienced by people who don't get the ticket for Easy Street.
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Some people have these small, positive schemes for survival, a kind of strength that I am attracted to, maybe because I'm prone to the blues.
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In Hollywood, only a female who's massively damaged is interesting.
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The immigration process is so unbelievably complicated and expensive and endless!
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There are documentaries that will just save your life and be the conduit to the art form you started out loving.
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I will always face the conundrum that the subjects I'm attracted to aren't essentially commercial.
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I think, in some ways, that is the balm of stories, of fables, of tales: it's the way we're wired. We have always needed to distill what we're going through and try to understand it by looking either backwards or forwards. And the hardest is to look in the now.
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My first narrative films developed out of a documentary process - finding someone who was willing to be filmed, watching, listening, taking copious notes and many hours of video footage.
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I think one thing that's always a concern to me is you see a role, and you're not seeing the character; you're seeing so-and-so do it. Then I'm taken out of the story considerably, personally.
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In documentary, mostly, people are going to say untoward things; people are going to have gnarly beliefs. People aren't perfect.
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It's funny: your happiness is contingent on a bigger picture besides just yourself.
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Our necks are getting injured from looking down, and the movie screen gives you opportunity to look up, you know? It gives you an opportunity to possibly have a discussion with someone afterwards.
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History has shown that there needs to be some agora, or public spaces, and I think that we already live a lot of our life on a laptop, or even smaller devices that we hold in our hands.
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You will never go wrong with actually photographing process. It's primitive. Humans love to see the bipedal animal in us finish things. We just like it!
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I need and want to see capable women. I don't like to see them weep all the time.
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When I'm interested in an aspect of someone's life, I want to ask about their experiences, their survival strategies, and what they do to keep their lives interesting.
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Every filmmaker has this short book of films that don't get made - for a whole host of reasons.
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In the U.K., working-class lives are depicted with the characters' humour, but in the U.S., people with difficulties are often depicted with pious or simply dreary lives.
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A role is never just a ready-made thing.
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I don't want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, 'Hey people, hey people!'
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When men's lives become extremely hard, women learn how to deal with them and assist them but also develop quiet systems of coping and managing.
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Film is a team thing. There is no auteur.
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I'm reaching for emotion and drama, the drama of the everyday: what happens when you don't have shelter, food, and clothing. There are some stakes. If you're displaced or evicted, there's a suspense: How will you solve that?
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Humour is the be-all and end-all medicine of human existence.