Top 66 Marielle Heller Quotes

I’m getting more and more used to the fact that being a director and being a woman are two things that everyone wants to talk about, because it’s so rare.

I do think there’s a weird stigma where people probably think that female directors are a risk.

It feels like there are two very different parts to making movies. There’s the making of it and then there’s the putting out of it – and I like the making of the movies a lot more than putting it out into the world.

I guess I always view movies as, in their best form, connecting us more to each other and to humanity.

Just make things, and find people you love working with. If you’re working on something you truly love and are passionate about, you will do your best work.

Movies require a minor miracle to get made.

I think that instead of laying out ahead of time where my career is going to go, I try to make decisions that feel like they’re the best steps for me in that moment.

I just don’t want to ever make decisions based on something that I feel like I shouldn’t do, or if it’s a logical career step. It has to be something that inspires me. Because if it’s not something that inspires me, then I’m not going to do it well. And that doesn’t help anybody.

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.

With all of the bad things that are happening in the world right now, I think we need a message of togetherness and true unity. I believe that starts with personal reflection and then we can find kindness toward each other.

I spent most of my 20s working as an actor. I started writing and directing because I was frustrated with the types of roles that were available to young women.

When I do interviews about movies I direct, I often talk about how my superpower as a director is that I’m an actor. I can talk to actors. I’m not afraid of actors.

I don’t think any movie is going to make some kid run out and have sex.

The beauty of film is that you can get closer than you can in theater, you know? I come from theater, and I remember feeling like I was almost cheating when I would put the camera so close to somebody’s face when I was filming them.

I’m a director… I don’t wear any makeup, and wear jeans every day.

I remember the first time somebody classified me as a feminist. I was in fourth grade. And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, is that what I am?’ At the time, I just cared about equality.

But the idea behind French hours is that instead of doing a 12 and a half or 13-hour day with a lunch break in the middle, you do a 10-hour straight day. Everyone kind of eats food throughout the day anyway on the set.

I do think there’s probably a little more opportunity to direct in television, because there are just so many TV shows. In movies, it still feels harder to break in. I do hope that’s shifting. The difference between TV and miniseries and movies is also diminishing.

I’m not the type of person who can be a director for hire, I have to find my own way into it.

A lot of acting is waiting for people to let you do your job.

I love human beings, and I love their faces.

I so related to John Hughes movies.

One of the boring tricks about capturing Broadway onscreen, actually, is just about all the different unions.

I was so involved in my own life I wasn’t even aware of what was happening in the outside world, but as I got older I was constantly reflecting back on my own teenagehood and feeling like I hadn’t been represented.

It makes white men uncomfortable that there aren’t more stories about them because it somehow is perpetuating the idea that they aren’t the center of the universe – and they wouldn’t give up that position lightly.

My five-year-old, before the quarantine, joined a chess class in our neighborhood in Brooklyn, and my husband was learning to play so that they could play against each other.

I’m a pretty busy director and it’s pretty hard for me to have three months where I could just leave the country and go work on someone’s else’s project.

Molly Ringwald’s characters always had a complex personal life, and I appreciated that.

What Mr Rogers was offering to children were lessons we all need in our world right now: patience, kindness, acceptance and true self-reflection.

I think all the actors I’ve worked with knew that I was an actor. Like, I get into the dirt with my actors and we figure out the rhythm of the scene and how it needs to sound and what the blocking is, the way you would with another actor.

I don’t think the purpose of movies is to tell people how to live their lives.

I remember thinking when I set out to direct my movie that it was all about lenses and the shots you were going to get. Really, directing is about tapping into what makes us the most human, telling stories, emotions, and managing a group of empathetic people.

You want to make movies about extraordinary people, but those extraordinary people have to have a huge journey.

I was really serious about being an actress. I was playing young female characters and not feeling very connected to them.

Actually, Nicole Holofcener’s movies have always felt really right to me. ‘Lovely & Amazing’ is a movie about women’s bodies that I feel is so truthful and painful and real.

I love movies where the explosions and fireworks are happening inside someone’s heart and mind instead of outside.

Why do so many women drop out of the workforce at this age, in our late 30s, early 40s? Well, often it’s because we’re raising kids, so, let’s be honest about that.

I come from theater and captured theater has a bad rap of being never what the live performance was.

Becoming a writer, and then a director, was taking my creative life in my own hands, and wanting to have stories that I wanted to put out into the world – and I have fallen in love with directing.

The more women directors that get hired, the more practices will shift, top down.

Mr. Rogers would not make a good protagonist of a narrative film. He’s without conflict, he’s too far along on his journey toward enlightenment to be a good protagonist. Our protagonists have to be struggling with demons in a certain way.

I know I dressed way too provocatively when I look back. I was in that weird phase of feeling suddenly like my body was a woman’s body and not a kid’s body.

I feel some responsibility, being one of the few women directors who are being given opportunities. Sometimes, that makes me want to take on some big franchise because I want to show people that women can do it.

It’s funny because you start watching Mister Rogers so young, it’s sort of in this subliminal part of your brain. I think that’s why people have such a visceral reaction to him.

For the same reason I want to make movies about women, I also want to make movies that help men be better men and that can be an antidote to toxic masculinity.

I hate the narrative that people have to be tortured in order to be good artists. I think it’s a solipsistic view that people use in order to be selfish.

I think there used to be more respect toward young people in movies. John Hughes really respects his characters and they’re given their emotional weight. He does so even with kids, but especially with teenagers.

My normal way of filming something is, like, one camera, very well planned out, knowing exactly how we’re going to get each shot.

Our culture of the Bay Area is a place where you want to be different. You want to be seen. You want to be heard.

When you’re directing, you look around and you think, everything I see is my responsibility. From the catering being on time to whether the clouds are moving the way I need them to move to whether this actor is giving the performance I want to whether the costumes are what they should be.

I was in theater school playing Lady Macbeth and doing these great dramatic parts, and then I got out into the real world and was auditioning for commercials, and just not getting to do anything that felt remotely meaningful.

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.

Historically, we’ve attached a lot of shame to women and their bodies – probably since biblical times. It’s a way that patriarchal societies have perpetuated.

A lot of us as adults haven’t learned how to cope with our feelings, deal with our anger or work through the pain of our childhoods.

I was one of those probably annoying little kids who was always putting on plays with my family.

When I said yes to doing ‘Queen’s Gambit,’ I was feeling burned out on directing and movie-wise wasn’t sure what my next big project was going to be. So I said yes to doing this very different type of project that required a different skill set from me, sort of just to shake things up, if anything.