Trauma creates one of four types of people: victims, rescuers, or perps - and if you're really lucky and really strong and very willing and brave, survivors.
Allison Anders
Music has always been a great solace for me. It's still something that gives me far more joy than movies, I must say. I love movies, too. But somehow, music can transport you. There are so many different kinds of experiences you can have with music.
Nothing feels worse than knowing that people didn't see your movie. That they wanted to and the critics loved it but nobody knew where it was because it didn't do what it was supposed to do opening weekend. It used to be that independents were allowed to stay in the theaters, build word of mouth.
You end up giving up half your salary every time you make a movie because you need the money to make the movie you have in your head.
I think that with the success of, like, VH1's 'Behind The Music' and stuff like that, the fact that it's so successful, it's clear that people are interested in rock lives.
It was such a struggle for me to make it off welfare. I was getting $630 a month for myself and my children with no support from their fathers. The rent was $600 a month, and if you got a job, they took it out of your welfare.
I don't know that movies are important. But I know that stories are important. Movies may disappear. They've only been around, for God's sake, for the last hundred years... I think that it's the need to tell stories, and that people need to be told stories. It's the old sitting around the fire, you know.
Movies can tell us about our place, or lack of place, in our culture.
Because I came from the working class, I still identify with them. I don't identify with the middle class.
For me, the most exciting thing is that Jane Campion is a woman we can all really look up to. She doesn't have the body of work that some other directors do - no woman director does - but her work is so consistently original, wonderful, masterful.
I love showing off my tattoos.
Art should never be held above our decency to each other.
I had breast cancer. I caught it early.
The women I cast have to embody all sorts of contradictions... I have to find the right woman to speak to other women.
I don't believe you ever get closure on anything. Things leave a permanent mark on you.
During the '90s, a lot of us in the indie film world were not making our money off our movies. We were screenwriters doing scripts for hire for studios.
I hope the next actress offered millions to play the 'fat girl for the day' stops to think about this before she signs the contract - even if just to ask, like any professional actress would in any other situation, 'Why does she weigh 350 pounds? And why me for the part?' If the director can't answer these questions, don't do the movie.
This practice of skinny actresses donning fat suits is essentially the new and acceptable blackface in Hollywood.
When you're traumatized, you pick out one thing you remember more than anything else.
My work is better, maybe all filmmakers are better, for Polanski's imprint on cinema. He created language for all of us to use, there is no question about that.
Do we have to be rail thin to possess 'outer beauty' and sex appeal and to be capable of attracting lovers?
While we can work hard at improving our health, size is no more in our control than the color of our skin, our ethnicity, or our sexual preference.
Nowadays you don't get to see composition in a movie because nobody ever keeps the camera still long enough to see it. Actors don't have the thrill and the power of working with space.
Unless it's something very clever like 'Memento,' most independent films have a very tough life out there.
In the early '90s when the American independent movie started, it held personal vision as a premium. That was brilliant timing.
The first thing I did for TV was a pilot for CBS.
I think when I got drawn to film, I didn't know it was a business. I mean, like most filmmakers, I probably saw more films than a lot of people when I was a kid. But I watched them on TV as well. I was no purist about it. I spent lots of time in movie theaters, but I also watched a lot of films on TV.
I'd be just as happy being a midwife. That's my ideal job.
You still get the movies made. A filmmaker can always scrape up money to do a movie. The passion drives it. And you'll get the money. Money's the easiest thing. But the hardest thing is finding a way for people to see your movie.
When I wanted to become a filmmaker, there was nobody for me to look up to.
Before, I just don't think we knew how much music was out there; now with MySpace, it's really opened it up. Filmmakers have so much more choice.
In 'Honeymoon in Vegas,' after Nicolas Cage tells his fiancee that he's given her away to pay for his gambling debts, she gets into a tizzy as if she were a 6-year-old. I couldn't believe it.
Let's face it - no matter how independent you are, you still have this nagging need to be desired.
Maybe women sometimes wish that a man would come along and buy them.
There's never been a 'girl wonder' mythology.
I've been amazed watching people who are not ready with their scripts when they're getting a lot of attention.
When 'Gas Food Lodging' was released, I had already shot 'Mi Vida Loca.'
Sundance is the only hand that feeds for women directors.
Box office is one of the strongest tools we have toward preserving our ability to make our movies. We really can make a difference by purchasing a ticket each opening weekend to a movie made by a woman, even if you don't like the movie or the filmmaker and even if you don't see the film.
There's a persona that musicians carry with them. I like to find what's under the persona.
Roman Polanski is one of my favorite filmmakers, and John Phillips one of my favorite songwriters. I had the honor to meet each of these men and was almost giddy to be blessed with the chance to tell each artist what his work meant has to me.
Because I'm one of five people in Los Angeles who doesn't drive, I walk a lot.
I was a single mom.
I had always felt deep down that I owned the characters. Much as I adored and cherished the work of my actors, I felt that they were cast to do and be what I could not physically do or be.
I've worked on movies where there's all these people coming and going, and I don't even know who they are.
I was a big fan of X. I've probably seen 100 X shows during their time in the late '70s and early '80s.
