Words matter. These are the best Debra Granik Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We need cultural awareness and a cooperative approach with other countries versus a dominating approach.
There are so many American experiences that we can’t know about unless we venture out to create a dialogue, to observe, ask questions, and stay there for a while.
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.
Humour is used in struggle and solving difficult things, and I relish that tradition.
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!
No one has a green light when they start a documentary – not ever.
#TimesUp is you can’t hold it in anymore: Time’s up! The doors have to give way. It can’t be that every 27-year-old born into a male body is a designated genius. It can’t be that the language used to review male and female films is different.
I’d love to do a comedy – something where a character has to use humor to navigate the absurdities of life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Emerging actors know there’s a whole lot to learn each time they are spending with someone who’s done a lot.
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.
‘Winter’s Bone’ really suited having a lower budget. It would be so hard rolling into a rural setting, a place where people are poor, and to be thinking you’ve got $10 million to make a piece of entertainment.
I come from what they call the land of nowhere. I’m from the suburb. It’s extremely atomizing.
I find it so hard to make films about my own region, but it could happen.
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.
My producing partner and I were shown a novel we really liked. It was called ‘My Abandonment’ by Peter Rock, and we enjoyed reading it.
We just started filming ‘Stray Dog’ really close to the finishing of ‘Winter’s Bone,’ down in Southern Missouri.
What I would love is for people to see some of the stories I want to tell.
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.
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.
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.
A big part of the equation for ‘Winter’s Bone’ was making it for so little that we owe nobody. We had a guaranteed loan and were able to pay it back.
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.
I swing with a lot of torque from non-fiction to fiction, and I really like that place in between.
I get very caught up in the day-to-day and immersed in the scenes as they unfold. It’s harder for me, as I’m filming, to see the larger story.
It’s funny: your happiness is contingent on a bigger picture besides just yourself.
Humour is the be-all and end-all medicine of human existence.
There’s all these costs of war, and they’re huge and long-lasting. It’s not just the numbers CNN broadcasts. And we never want to pay the VA bill; we never want to pay the bill to take care of these warriors after we applaud their sacrifice.
You can’t just pill away injuries that go deep in someone. They don’t just stop those feelings from existing.
A role is never just a ready-made thing.
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.
For whole swaths of people, that map of, ‘Come along this way, come to college, do this and that,’ isn’t offered.
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.
Every filmmaker has this short book of films that don’t get made – for a whole host of reasons.
Sometimes I struggle with being American.
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.’
Film is a team thing. There is no auteur.
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?
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.
The immigration process is so unbelievably complicated and expensive and endless!
Social realism takes research.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m from the East Coast, and so therefore, the Pacific Northwest forest is very exotic land to me.
There are documentaries that will just save your life and be the conduit to the art form you started out loving.
