Top 95 Quotes & Sayings by Marielle Heller - Page 2

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It's advice I always give to directors when they're starting out: Take an acting class to really see what it feels like to be an actor. And I have always felt like one of my strengths as a director is that I share a language and a vocabulary with actors.

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.

Somehow I had a lot of the skills that I didn't know were required for directing. I didn't realize that my life had been leading in that direction.

Someone once shared a statistic with me about how long it takes women to make their second films. On average, it's three years for men and eight years for women.

I think acting helps me as a director no matter what. There is something about being reminded about the vulnerability it takes to be an actor and what I'm really asking of actors every day when I'm on set as a director that I think it's a really good reminder.

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

As women we are very accustomed to putting ourselves in the shoes of male leads.

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 was always seen as defiant. And I did know that as a kid. It just wasn't something that was stamped out of me. I often had problems in school where I would stand up to teachers or I would believe that something they were saying was wrong.

A lot of us love seeing characters on screen who say and do things we would never dare in real life.

I had a great family. Nobody ever told me that I should stop raising my hand in class or that I should become - as a girl, that I should somehow become less confident.

I come from the world of theater, and I know Noel Coward's writing well. He has such a specific voice, and was one of the wittiest writers who ever lived, and you think of him in the same category as someone like Shakespeare who's just impossible to imitate.

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.

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

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.

Every actor is different, but it's a very fine line when it comes to how much information they have versus how much they need to let their imagination fill in the blanks.

Movies require a minor miracle to get made.

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'm the oldest of three kids and I remember my brother and sister still watching Mr Rogers while I felt too big and too sophisticated to watch it.

I so related to John Hughes movies.

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 like working in TV, but my real love is making movies.

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.

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

In some ways the nudity really makes people feel more uncomfortable because it's not nudity that is just making bodies look like sexy little pieces of body parts stuck together. It's much more blunt and real and there is not a sexy soundtrack behind it all.

Seeing yourself reflected on screen is a very important part of being human. It makes us feel less alone, it make us feel more connected to humanity. Women, gay men, and trans people for a long time have not seen themselves represented, so being able to show the complexities that we all have - just as complex stories as a heterosexual white male - is crucial for us to feel more human and have other people see us as human beings.

Things like pornography perpetuates this idea that women are just there as objects of male desire and are not complex people with their own sexuality and humanity.

My advice for anyone wanting to direct is that nobody is going to hand you an opportunity. You have to create your own opportunities and not take no for an answer.

Showing a real human body and a woman who is looking at her body without shame - that alone is a radical notion. Showing a young woman who is honest about what she is experiencing and letting us into her most intimate, darkest thoughts, all of that is just promoting something that we don't get to see about young women.