Quotes from Debra Granik

My producing partner and I were shown a novel we really liked. It was called 'My Abandonment' by Peter Rock, and we enjoyed reading it.

I'm always searching to learn more about our large and diverse country.

It's been a pleasure to see female comedians be prominent and flourish - like Kate McKinnon's Rudy Giuliani impressions, which are uncanny in their precision.

Time's up on cheesy, lesser, boring roles for females in the stories that we try to tell.

The challenge for me is to make sure I've done my work. To make sure not every scene is quiet, that other scenes rise up, that there's different tension.

I have, obviously, a very complex relationship with the more industrial side of filmmaking and the machinery that can take an actor or an actress and create something so bamboozling and monumental and fathomless in terms of publicity hits.

#TimesUp is you can't hold it in anymore: Time's up! The doors have to give way. It can't be that every 27-year-old born into a male body is a designated genius. It can't be that the language used to review male and female films is different.

'Winter's Bone' really suited having a lower budget. It would be so hard rolling into a rural setting, a place where people are poor, and to be thinking you've got $10 million to make a piece of entertainment.

We just started filming 'Stray Dog' really close to the finishing of 'Winter's Bone,' down in Southern Missouri.

The protagonist in 'Winter's Bone' was a really good role for a female. She was strong; she didn't have to conform to something or be a sidekick to any man. That's part of what you're responding to; it's a woman-centric situation. Her value in the film was not reliant on any man.

A big part of the equation for 'Winter's Bone' was making it for so little that we owe nobody. We had a guaranteed loan and were able to pay it back.

When I read Daniel Woodrell's novel 'Winter's Bone,' I was drawn to the characters, the setting, and the sound of the dialog.

I think, in some ways, that is the balm of stories, of fables, of tales: it's the way we're wired. We have always needed to distill what we're going through and try to understand it by looking either backwards or forwards. And the hardest is to look in the now.

In documentary, you are sometimes burdened, or you feel very responsible for dealing with - I want to say - more complicated themes. Fiction allows for greater distillation.

You have so much more time to observe and learn with a documentary because of the time between the shoots. You get a much deeper understanding of day-to-day life and its themes. It's also much more of a mess after three years; you have to comb it out carefully and see what fits together and makes sense.

Films set in 90210 are ten a penny. But there's rarely room to make films about a different postal code, to show the lives of ordinary Americans who have to live with very limited material resources.

I'm someone who's always looking for hope - if there's a ray of hope, a shrapnel, shred, a flake of hope - because I take the misfortune or hard times of others very seriously.

A role is never just a ready-made thing.

Social realism takes research.

No one has a green light when they start a documentary - not ever.

I always think that my assignment is to seek out stories that are experienced by people who don't get the ticket for Easy Street.

The Oscars have always been an arena in which very commercial films are recognised, and I don't mean that in a bitter way; I just didn't ever look in that direction.

I love to champion some of the hardworking actors where, it's been said to me, they don't bring money. But to me, they bring everything. They bring their wonderful selves.

All filmmakers want the option to make another film, to have it not always be such an uphill battle - for it to be our life, our working life.