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.

Karyn Kusama

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.

Karyn Kusama

Sometimes evil is in the form of a malignant clown, and sometimes evil is in the form of policy and legislators, and sometimes it's a grinning death mask and it has something more viscerally terrifying about it.

Karyn Kusama

A lot of the best suspense operates on a careful withholding of information as opposed to the doling out of information.

Karyn Kusama

Best advice: 'Just be yourself.' Worst advice: 'Just be yourself.'

Karyn Kusama

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

Karyn Kusama

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.

Karyn Kusama

Making 'The Invitation' and waiting to make it on my terms and getting final cut and doing it the way I needed to do it was incredibly challenging, but it has really been so great for me. I'm so thankful that that's happened, that I got to work with actors I really like and have just such a good experience in delving into that story.

Karyn Kusama

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.

Karyn Kusama

I think there are always going to be people who say, even if they are engaged in the movie, they just want it to move faster.

Karyn Kusama

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

Karyn Kusama

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

Karyn Kusama

I'm a director first and foremost, and I hope that the fact that I'm female is just one of the many things that informs my unique perspective on the world.

Karyn Kusama

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.

Karyn Kusama

Polanski is a great example of a person whose personal life clearly has been just fraught with scandal and transgression and criminal acts. And yet, in 'Rosemary's Baby,' I think he's made one of the crowning feminist statements in film.

Karyn Kusama

One of the things you hear about when studying the nature of fanaticism is that a lot of the time, people don't start as fanatics. They shift and evolve into that state. That's a process, a systematic process of losing your identity and sense of self.

Karyn Kusama

I do think there's a preoccupation that women understandably have with this idea of the roles we're meant to play and whether or not those roles serve us or ultimately kind of imprison us.

Karyn Kusama

When horror films are made in times of political strife, I think they're not made with an instinct to add to the chaos but to bring shape to it.

Karyn Kusama

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.

Karyn Kusama

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?

Karyn Kusama

It is important to know what audiences might expect from their genre movies, but I think it is also important to not give them everything they want. As a viewer, I think it can get pretty boring that way.

Karyn Kusama