Top 35 Anna Boden Quotes

There are studios out there and we have met them who take the movie away from the filmmaker and don’t want them to have input. But that’s not with Marvel.

One of the great things about Marvel is that they allow you to take pieces of the character and storylines from the comics and doing your own thing with that.

The truth is we were never considered for ‘Guardians of the Galaxy.’ It was misprinted. I think there was another directing team that had been considered.

I don’t think I knew that much about camera placement and working with actors when we did ‘Half Nelson.’

My parents were basketball people.

I mean, I totally believe in magic and superstition.

Whenever we’ve approached a story, it’s always started with the character, and the idea of some character struggling with some part of himself. That’s what gets us in.

We can always connect with all of our characters on a human level, but a lot of them took a lot of observation and exploration and talking with people. And we absolutely embrace our actors’ perspectives on all that.

We don’t think there are simple answers about that why someone is the way they are.

With ‘Half Nelson’ we had a little bit more leeway to let the political be more present, because he was a social-studies teacher and this was what he was teaching the kids, so we’d have those direct-to-camera addresses.

When we approach characters, we don’t have their full story in mind right off the bat. Through the writing process we raise questions about them, and we start to learn a bit more about them.

The Gambler’ is one of the movies that inspired us. We love that movie.

Especially as an independent director, when you’re writing something on spec and you’re trying to get it sold, you create this entire world in your head and you feel like you know every minutiae of how everything should be.

Emotionally, I don’t feel like a trailblazer at all.

The list of movies that ‘Captain Marvel’ is a love letter to is very expansive and strange.

With ‘Half Nelson,’ we went to Sundance and then we just bam, bam, bam, festival, festival, festival, festival and then we released in August.

We like to create an atmosphere where people can try whatever they want and experiment. But ultimately people tend to fall on the script and there isn’t a ton of improvisation. There certainly are some improvised moments and we encourage that. If it’s better than what we wrote it’ll be in the movie and if not, it’s out.

With our movies, you start off getting to know the characters in the way that you meet someone in real life, and then slowly, over time, you get little clues as to who they are. By the end there are still some mysteries, but hopefully you’re starting to understand them more.

I guess there are women who write from a very woman-centered place, but I don’t consider myself to be one of them.

I’m a very superstitious person. I come from a long line of superstitious people, so it’s not going anywhere. For instance, we have this thing on our movies where if one of the key personnel gets a haircut in the middle of the movie, it’s bad luck. I swear by that.

It would be great to be able to make a living by making films.

I think I was 10 when I saw my first R-rated movie, ‘Stand by Me,’ in the theater.

I mean, television has really changed a lot, and changed the way movie people think about working in the storytelling business.

There’s always the challenge of trying to do a road trip picture with a big group of cast and crew, because it’s just not efficient to go to every single place in the order that they would go.

We have nothing against working with actors.

The first time Brie Larson was really on our radar as somebody who we wanted to work with was ‘Short Term 12.’

It’s nice to work with the same people. You don’t have to be polite. You know each other’s likes and dislikes, and you don’t have to micromanage and look at what they’re doing every moment.

People, whether they be male or female, are equally a mystery to me.

What gets us excited about any movie is the social relevance and the character themes and the character journeys and like the adventure story.

You get told a lot in school to tell what you know, write what you know. But what excites me about filmmaking, about being a storyteller, is being able to learn about other people, putting myself in somebody else’s shoes, whether that be someone from the Dominican Republic or someone from Cuba or inner-city Brooklyn.

I speak Spanish, not perfectly; it’s definitely my second language.

I think always whenever we’re casting a movie, it’s about sitting down with somebody and feeling in them some kind of the element of who our character is.

You want the character to keep being able to grow through the process of writing, through the process of filming, and editing, you want to discover things about that character.

I’m one of the most superstitious people I know. There are these two battling parts of me, one is very rational and intellectual, and the other part of me, at my core, I believe in magic in a certain way, and serendipity.

I took a class my freshman year in high school called Intro To Film, and I was introduced to Robert Altman’s films, and I wrote my first paper on a filmmaker and it was Altman’s ‘M*A*S*H,’ and Nashville and I think ‘Short Cuts’ or ‘The Player,’ I don’t remember.