Top 110 Quotes & Sayings by Karyn Kusama - Page 2

Horror, almost better than any of the other genres, pits the will to live against the will toward nihilism. I just think that's worth exploring. I don't know what is more important, actually, to explore than that very dynamic.

I think being a young female star must be really, really pretty rough.

When I reflect on the losses I've experienced, I've come to believe that those experiences were transformative, that they shaped who I am.

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.

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.

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.

What makes a lot of suspenseful films work is very, very particular points of view and very subjective use of the camera.

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.

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.

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

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.

What I do think is really interesting is that, as I get older and more mature, I'm really attuned to how frightening this world is that we live in.

I think there is really something we need to examine about the notion of careers, and are women encouraged and given the same opportunities to have vital healthy careers in which they are challenged by certain things, they try new things, they struggle, maybe they stumble, maybe they fail, and then there's more room to succeed as well.

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 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'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'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.

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 there's a reason why some companies have such dismal records. It's not because they're clueless; it's because they systematically don't want to hire women.

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.

It's freeing to be able to consistently make creative decisions and ask creative questions of the team without feeling like, 'Does this make me vulnerable to getting canned?' That's a big part of being in a studio - they can always fire you.

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.

I think we forget that part of parenthood means having to face and reject or face and embrace a kind of animal capacity for unkindness. And if, when, parents do embrace that, it reveals something very ugly to oneself.

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.

I would love to make lighter entertainments that have you sort of hopping and skipping and jumping out of the theater, but part of me just doesn't know how much I believe in that, as much as I want to.

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.

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.

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

I'm just hoping that as I get older, and as more and more movies get made by female directors, what we start to see is how, in the same way good male directors get a shot at creating interesting male and female characters, women do as well.

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.

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 assumed a business like a film studio would behave like a business and still want to protect its own interests, still do the best it could to get as many people paying for as many of their movies as possible. I realized this is not actually a business about business: it's a business of egos and dominance.

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

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.

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. And I'm not seeing a lot of that right now among a sizable portion of American politics and American voters. I'm not seeing that kind of use of critical thinking, and it really, really freaks me out.

That complacency and that willingness to give yourself over to a larger power structure is how civilizations destroy themselves. And I just hope people wake up from the slumber they've willed themselves to. Because we're really in a dark place right now.

Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it.

There's just so much lazy violence directed at women. But beyond that, lazy violence directed at humans generally. Just lazy violence.

I want people to leave the theater wrestling with the idea that our pain - physical, emotional, and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed, or "fixed."

I am honored and lucky to be one of the first films funded by Gamechanger Films, a consortium of investors who finance movies directed by women.

I'm really interested in violence. And I think there's an inevitably cinematic property that violence brings to the moviegoing experience. But one still has to be thoughtful and mature about how you depict it and how you think it through. You have to think about the effects that violence has on audiences, and it's deployed so casually that I think it's losing its meaning. And when things like violence and murder and the dehumanization of other people lose their meaning, then we're really kind of in a place where we have to reexamine and take a hard look at ourselves.

What I'm starting to really grapple with, as someone who likes to tell stories, is that humans more than any other animal species seem open and willing to control, assert dominance, and behave cruelly. That's a whole kind of new nightmare to really have to face about your own species. That we are, in some respects, cannibalistic, in that we are willing to destroy ourselves. That's really something for me to be exploring over the long haul.

Motherhood is this sort of "curtain lifting" of tremendous power that we have individually as women. It's tremendously freaky to have a human being grow inside your body and eventually turn into a human being, and then birth that human being, and then have them be separate from you. Those things are scary. It's also really, really scary to face the idea of losing a child and losing someone you love more than you've loved anything before. All of those things are innately really terrifying, and what it does to me is bring me to a direct kind of confrontation with my human vulnerability.

I don't want to make studio films if I am constantly fighting to assert some kind of leadership within the process. I'm not hired to be a really nice person who comes up with solutions to problems now and then. I'm hired to be the director.

I'm seeing more and more interesting horror come my way. More and more interesting thrillers and genre films are coming my way from the studio level, and they're financed and they have movie stars attached and all of that. But a lot of times, the storytelling just doesn't speak to me. It feels like it's still oftentimes coming out of a kind of prescribed notion of normalcy, prescribed notion of gender roles. There's not a lot of "new" seeming to be happening.

Women still routinely get passed over when everyone sits around the table and says, "What's our list of 10, 20, 30 directors that we wanna put at the top of our list for this project?" You need more people who are either women who care about this issue or men who care about this issue, who are sitting in this room and saying, "Guys, where are the women? We need to be going out to women." And particularly in the projects that really could use a fresh feminine perspective, whatever that ultimately means.

Pain - physical, emotional and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed or "fixed." Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it. When we don't listen, our understanding of the world gets more and more distorted, and we become capable of doing things we very often regret.

I do think it's possible for me to go back to the studio, and for a lot of women filmmakers to be going back into studio filmmaking with a different sense of their own agency, and a different sense of the respect that they can command. When you asked the question about whether women want to be making big studio movies, the answer is almost always yes. It's just, how do they want to be treated? What is that experience going to be? And if you know the experience is gonna be shitty going into it, I personally am at a place where I'm not willing to punish myself any longer.

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. So that's one kind of terror to have to face. Am I a unicorn? What's sticking out of my head that I'm not seeing? I'm simply female, and that puts me alongside all of my human counterparts.