Quotes from Karyn Kusama

I had no shortage of wild times in my youth.

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.

I was lucky to work with Gamechanger Films, who are a consortium of investors financing films directed by women. This is a company that puts their money where their mouth is.

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 I was a pretty anxious dreamer, maybe a fundamentally lonely kid.

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.

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.

Always keep absorbing art and looking at paintings and reading books and watching movies in other languages, just getting to know the world at hand and the world of the past. It's important to keep absorbing the world and keep engaging with it, and often that means not thinking about movies and thinking about other things.

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

It's extremely instructive to realize that you cannot do everything. You need to delegate, to find experts, to consult with them. A big part of the job of directing is knowing when to take something on and when you shouldn't.

I don't think I could have had a better experience than I did with 'Girlfight.' It was a humbling experience to be so well received. And it was equally humbling to be ripped to pieces with 'Aeon Flux.'

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.

If you look at most mainstream filmmaking, to be honest, some of these films aren't even asking questions anymore at all.

Day-to-day concerns really trumped big dreams for quite a while in my life. I was so freaked out about money. And until, honestly, I was in my early thirties and made 'Girlfight,' that anxiety was a real issue: How are you going to live? How are you going to survive?

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.

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.

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

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

There are times when I'm kind of anti-social, I'm just really shy, and I don't feel like I fit in, and I then attribute that to some emotional state that's crippling me.

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.

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.

There's something about the girls and the boys who just live for the moment and don't think a second beyond their needs and the here and now that, ultimately, is pretty tragic.

I have had to really grapple with the fact that, while I wish things could be different at times, I ultimately needed to experience the transformation that comes with pain and loss and sorrow.

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.