Top 45 Sundance Quotes

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.

I see a lot of art; we see a lot of music, films at Sundance… that influences me and informs me more than theater just because I make a bigger effort to see other art forms.

My first film festival and my first film that I’ve ever been in, ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene,’ that was at Sundance.

When I went to Sundance for ‘Afternoon Delight,’ I came back feeling like I wanted to take my experience that I learned from directing and bring that into a series.

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!

What’s exciting about Sundance is that they’re making a name for themselves in this boutique television niche world, and there’s energy behind that.

I certainly felt like my life had been enriched and had also changed forever when I took ‘In A World…’ to Sundance.

Doing anything on a movie at Sundance is great.

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.

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 was growing up, ‘Butch and Sundance’ was my absolute favorite film.

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.

My dad brought ‘Clerks’ to Sundance 22 years ago, and that’s when his career started.

Sundance is going to be a defining moment in my life. But the unfortunate thing about Sundance is, when you have a film there, you can’t have the opportunity to see other films.

So many features at Sundance seemed to be powered more on the director’s need to be a director than any particular story.

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.

I’ve had something like seven films at Sundance, one of which won the Grand Jury Prize.

I so respect Sundance. I’d been hearing about it for years.

Sundance was started as a mechanism for the discovery of new voices and new talent.

Sundance took me on my first film and from there sort of launched my career.

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.

I had to live on $17,000 a year until I was 33, because I was a failed artist until I was 29, when I made my first short film that went to Sundance.

When I was younger I saw a movie called ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Those two actors and that movie was my inspiration to want to be an actor.

I think it’s probably a normal dream for an actor to be like, ‘My movie’s premiered at Sundance!’

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.

I grew up thinking there was something called ‘independent film,’ which I wouldn’t necessarily have had access to if there wasn’t Sundance.

Sundance is the only hand that feeds for women directors.

I’ve never seen a film get away completely unscathed like I have ‘Animal Kingdom.’ There’s not a single bad review that I’ve read of it yet; all through Sundance, all it got was high praise.

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 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.

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.

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 couldn’t get a job to save my life. That’s why I wrote ‘Road to Paloma.’ That got into Sundance and got into that scene, and that’s how I got the role in ‘The Red Road.’

There’s a great deal of women in film school. I was not the only woman in my class at UCLA. When I went through the Sundance program, it was half women and half men.

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.’

The Sundance Institute has been vital to the film communities of Latin America.

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.

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 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.

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.

I met Jill Soloway at Sundance a couple years ago. I was there for ‘Crystal Fairy’, and she was there for ‘Afternoon Delight’. She reached out and wanted to get together.

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.

The film’s success so far involves winning a couple of prizes at Cannes and Sundance, and getting some very nice reviews in newspapers and magazines. That hasn’t had a big impact on my life yet.

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.

I’m also on the Board at Sundance, so I’ve seen witnessed first hand the power of independent storytelling.