Quotes from Karyn Kusama

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've experienced a lot of successes. I've experienced a lot of failures. I've been able to get back up on my feet and keep going.

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.

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.

What might the world look like if we took some chances on the film-makers we might be afraid of?

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.

'The Invitation' is a meditation on grief and loss carried within a suspense drama. At its core, it's about a dinner party gone horribly wrong and about the consequences of denying our pain.

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

It's pretty gratifying to spend so long to make your first film and then feel like it got a lot of love - that was an incredible feeling. But there's something very distorting about that much attention. It felt like such a double-edged sword.

The people in the decision-making positions need to be thinking differently about who to hire, and looking more unsparingly at their choices. Why give this person a break over that person? Why give this person a second chance over that person? I do think that's where gender comes into play.

It's very difficult to figure out, for me, what stops really talented young female filmmakers from having the kind of careers that their really talented young male counterparts are having.

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.'

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

I am a mother now, and I'm a mother to a son, and I want him to go into the world a feminist. I want him to go into the world with compassion for humanity.