A Quote by Gillian Armstrong
Critics often say, 'Oh she makes films about strong women'. Wrong; I make films about complex characters and the choices they make.
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Some filmmakers make films to please themselves and a handful of critics, so they get 5-star reviews but their films don't run at the box office. I make films for the masses.
Meryl [Stripe]spoke out about the low percentage of female critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Why are there 760 male critics and just 168 women? You are immediately [biased] on what kind of films you are being told to go see. What are you told are good films? Male films.
I do not make films which are prescriptive, and I do not make films that are conclusive. You do not walk out of my films with a clear feeling about what is right and wrong. They're ambivalent. You walk away with work to do. My films are a sort of investigation. They ask questions . . .. Sometimes I hear that some [Hollywood] studio is interested in me. Then they discover that this is the guy who works with no script, that there is no casting discussion, no interference, that I have the final cut, and that does it.
It's not that I only want to make films about women, but from my experience, I have been very interested in the women who play these characters.
What I love about watching classic horror films is that they take you on a ride and they obviously make you scared because you're so invested in the characters, you're almost forgetting that oh my God, this is about to scare me.
If the audience shows that it is interested in films portraying strong women, then the producers will be tempted to make such films.
Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.
So many of my favorite stories, in any medium, are about friendship. Those relationships are so often just as emotional and complex as any romantic or family dynamics, and yet there's a dearth of resonant, grounded films about platonic bonds in American films.
I don't think women are that vastly different from men. I'm a bit of a woman myself. But I'm not a feminist filmmaker. I'm not making a feminist thesis to prove that women are important. I just happen to make films with strong characters that are women.
Everyone's films have done well of late. So when your film doesn't do well, you ask yourself, 'Oh, did I make a wrong choice?' And I strongly feel that it's your choices that make a good career. The track record has to be good.
I think it's very repressive for a woman to be constantly told that she has to make films about women to better represent women, but then the reverse is not found.
If we make films only for the frontbenchers, we can't make money. Hence, we have to make it for a majority audience. As my films are mass films, I deal with emotions in raw form - they are not subtle. I don't mind being branded. That does not mean I like only those kinds of films.
I make films about working class people. All my films have always been about that. For example, the brothel is a workplace. It's aberrant, but a workplace nonetheless. I was more interested as opposed to glamorizing and saying, oh, this is a great erotic place, it's a place of business. The commodity is sex.
I don't think I make genre films. I think studios try to sell films as genres because they know how to do that. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't know what I make. It's sort of a pot roast, all my films.
It's a terrible thing to make films that are never seen or experienced by audiences. Often times nobody knows about them, even though they are great films. They are not promoted and that's really sad.
I'm deeply appreciative that many people have enjoyed my films, films that I made in my own style. The successes have helped me learn how to make films free of expectations and focus solely on the pure filmmaking aspect, without worrying about how much money it'll make.
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