Top 50 Karyn Kusama Quotes

I’ve experienced a lot of successes. I’ve experienced a lot of failures. I’ve been able to get back up on my feet and keep going.

Somehow, even though you have less time and less money, the thing about making indie films is somehow you have another kind of resource: a human resource, where you can really look to your creative colleagues and actually ask questions that are honest.

I don’t want to direct a Marvel movie. I don’t care about those mythologies.

What kind of world is it if we allow people who are violent and do terrible things off the hook? What does that say about the world we’re living in – it’s like a world upside down, right?

I’m ultimately drawn to film many kinds of stories if they are sort of about unlocking the secrets of our human potential.

I have had to really grapple with the fact that, while I wish things could be different at times, I ultimately needed to experience the transformation that comes with pain and loss and sorrow.

The short form, for those people who can master it – and I am by no means one of them – it is very admirable, because it is really hard to tell stories that can stick with the audience and still be between 5 and 30 minutes long. I think it’s a real challenge.

I think that idea that sort of our emotional self and our emotional life is a faucet that you turn on and off, and that we are in control of it entirely, that’s a really appealing idea for a lot of people. But there are certainly the times where it’s appealing to me, but it never quite works the way I hoped it would.

Along with loving the script, the reason I did ‘Aeon Flux’ was because I needed the job, and I couldn’t find $5 million to make a movie independently – after making a fairly successful movie for a million dollars.

Sci-fi and horror, particularly, allow a storyteller to depart from, let’s say, the demands of cinema verite or kitchen-sink realism or, even, just relatable dramas and can go into areas that are either – in the case of horror – more primally effective or, in the case of sci-fi, more speculative or imaginative.

We have to accept that making movies is a never-ending process of occasional progress, frequent setbacks, and unexpected curveballs being thrown our way. Navigating that process requires stamina, curiosity, openness, and creative fire.

I’d like to be making more films more frequently, but I do find that making movies, for me, has proven to be an extremely challenging road. No movie is easy; no movie has come together quickly.

What might the world look like if we took some chances on the film-makers we might be afraid of?

To me, the thing that sets us apart from so many other animal species is our ability to ask questions, investigate, gather information, come to our own conclusions, and sometimes depart from the pack, sometimes move away from the tribe.

One of the uncertain pleasures of adulthood, for me, has really been about confronting how little I know about the world and how much completely baffles me about the world and human behavior.

There’s no glory in climbing a mountain if all you want to do is to get to the top. It’s experiencing the climb itself – in all its moments of revelation, heartbreak, and fatigue – that has to be the goal.

I feel like, generally, the golden eras of cinema seem to be in moments of incredible political turmoil and strife and struggle.

One thing I don’t do anymore as I’ve gotten older is that I don’t make big blanket statements about whether or not an artist is good or bad.

I had no shortage of wild times in my youth.

If you look at most mainstream filmmaking, to be honest, some of these films aren’t even asking questions anymore at all.

I just know I have so much to teach my child. And I just feel kind of like, what would our world be without mothers? What would our world be without mother love? I don’t think we’d have a world.

For me, there’s something about a certain kind of genre film that has real potency in its emotional landscape.

Claire Denis’s ‘Beau Travail’ is one of Denis’s greatest achievements. One of the most mysterious and beautiful endings in movies.

I think the crux of this urgent and real conversation about representation and diversity in art-making and storytelling both behind and in front of the camera ultimately has to do with simply seeing more human perspectives.

For me, I feel like I don’t see myself as all that different from other humans as a woman, but I’m surprised by how frequently I’m asked to see myself differently.

Making movies, even though it’s a business, is also an art, and sometimes you don’t hit the bull’s-eye.

I feel a kinship to the idea of beloved stories and beloved pieces of art that we can imagine in different ways and sort of take a meta approach in terms of what those stories offer us.

Genre mechanics are really tricky because if you pay too much attention to the idea of rules of genre, it becomes pretty stale, pretty fast.

It’s extremely instructive to realize that you cannot do everything. You need to delegate, to find experts, to consult with them. A big part of the job of directing is knowing when to take something on and when you shouldn’t.

I think most women have to fight very hard for the opportunities they want, which isn’t to say that most artists don’t have to do that, male or female, but I’m definitely aware of just how difficult it is to find stories that interest me, particularly.

I’m very interested in dysfunction. I kind of realized in my first film that a character with so much rage that she didn’t know where to put it was both heartbreaking and interesting to me.

For me, I guess I feel like the notion of ‘feel good’ entertainment… I’m all for it, but I just think you really, really, really have to earn it. I’m not sure I have a lot of movies in me where I see a world that earns it.

I understand the power of sorrow, and I understand how far it can take us from ourselves if we let it.

I think my narrative is actually pretty interesting if I step back from it and don’t engage too much in it, personally or emotionally.

The genre of horror is really just a way to manage much larger, much more terrifying realities in our daily worlds.

Day-to-day concerns really trumped big dreams for quite a while in my life. I was so freaked out about money. And until, honestly, I was in my early thirties and made ‘Girlfight,’ that anxiety was a real issue: How are you going to live? How are you going to survive?

Sometimes you realize that the thing an actor is asking for isn’t exactly the thing they want. Maybe they’re asking for more dialogue, or maybe they want a deep intellectual exploration of their role. But probably what they really need is encouragement.

I guess because there aren’t many women working in the kind of variety of spaces that I’ve had the opportunity and privilege to kind of work in, that there is this extreme scrutiny about my career.

Our society is constantly creating this framework for girls to feel that their only worth is their appearance, and it’s damaging on so many levels to so many people.

That’s the most important thing for me is just figuring out how and if I’m growing as an artist.

It’s hard to prep a movie in five days and shoot it in five days and cut it in barely any time. You don’t get quite enough time to make the thing, let alone tell the story.

I want to make big movies – but I don’t want to have to die a little death every single time I do. Until I meet the people or the studio or the business people who will let me do things a little bit more the way that I need to do them, I probably shouldn’t be making big studio movies.

‘The Invitation’ is a meditation on grief and loss carried within a suspense drama. At its core, it’s about a dinner party gone horribly wrong and about the consequences of denying our pain.

The nice thing about movies is that you can sort of steer your audience toward seeing that there’s discomfort, but there’s also this sense of, ‘Well, we’ll tolerate this weirdness because maybe it’ll be interesting.’

The best horror walks a line that’s completely on a psychological level, not needing the typical tropes of traditional horror filmmaking, then also having to tease out those elements in a way that makes the audience feel like they know what they’re in.

For better and for worse, I feel like sorrow and grief are really transformative personal experiences for me, and I question what I would be had I decided to take a different path and not embrace that kind of pain.

I grew up in the Midwest. I understand a sense of the small-town mentality, small-town social politics.

Reading the script for ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ I just thought that here was a script that really exposes the horror between girls and friendships. I always sort of approached the film with that in mind first, and then thought about the crazy ways that that horror would express itself.

I’ve been asked countless times, ‘Why are you drawn to horror films? Why do you think women are drawn to horror films?’ And it’s because, in a way, it’s one of the few genres that tells it like it is. A lot of times, women do feel like they’re running for their lives somehow.

I love horror. It’s funny, because ‘The Invitation’ never struck me as horror, but it’s definitely that type of thriller.