Quotes from Debra Granik

In the U.K., working-class lives are depicted with the characters' humour, but in the U.S., people with difficulties are often depicted with pious or simply dreary lives.

My first camera job was filming workplace safety videos, which involved months of watching and videotaping people doing their jobs. I was hooked - from there, I wanted to know where they lived and the rest of their habits and desires.

I find it so hard to make films about my own region, but it could happen.

Every filmmaker has this short book of films that don't get made - for a whole host of reasons.

I would fail if I had to work with stars. And I also can't afford to work that way. I can't afford to have special circumstances for rarified individuals. So, I work with actors who have given me a sign that they're willing to work in these more humble circumstances, in real-life locations.

Humour is the be-all and end-all medicine of human existence.

Action films don't speak to me, because that's not my skill set. I also have a lot of stipulations about stories I don't want to perpetuate, ones that bring me down or make me feel like life's not worth living.

There's a period where you feel very hinky and low about yourself, like, 'That was a lot of time, and there's nothing to show for it.' I've tried to tell myself that if you're going to be a filmmaker, you can't really talk like that about time, because you'll hate yourself or feel very worthless.

It's risky to show poor Americans. People see it as a downer. But I really wanted to make a tightly wound piece of storytelling that also happened to explode the myth of American affluence.

I feel like reality TV has thrown a difficult wrench in the system - on the programming and making side, and on the curating side - which is that we now have a higher threshold for the salacious. We have a higher threshold, unprecedented, for fast, cheap, and out of control.

Some of the subject matters that I like to make stories about are definitely not inherently commercial. So I have to look for a very special kind of financing and go down a very gentle path in order to make my films, as do basically all social-realist filmmakers. It's a long process.

You will never go wrong with actually photographing process. It's primitive. Humans love to see the bipedal animal in us finish things. We just like it!

Humour is used in struggle and solving difficult things, and I relish that tradition.

I don't want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, 'Hey people, hey people!'

There is a porous membrane between a documentary that doesn't use interviews and what you would call a neorealist hybrid film.

People need meeting places. You need places where ideas get exchanged and you see each other's faces once in a while.

We're always on the search for a novel or a source or an existing screenplay, or writing something ourselves that turns us on. But because films cost a lot of money to make and a huge amount of effort to get the people to rally, you have to really like it; you can't just semi-like it. Getting to 'really like' is the part that takes the minute.

The time that it takes to make the feature is really contingent on the feature being sort of almost ready-made - so coming to a book is more ready-made. You at least have the story that someone sorted out.

History has shown that there needs to be some agora, or public spaces, and I think that we already live a lot of our life on a laptop, or even smaller devices that we hold in our hands.

The immigration process is so unbelievably complicated and expensive and endless!

The questions that loom can be intimidating. 'What kind of moves is she gonna make? What is she gonna do?' There is this pressure that you're supposed to keep impressing.

I get very caught up in the day-to-day and immersed in the scenes as they unfold. It's harder for me, as I'm filming, to see the larger story.

It's almost like Time's Up allowed some really good old-school players to stand up and say, 'We're actually just really normal companies that want to facilitate culture-making. Some of us are even in it for the slow returns.'

I'd love to do a comedy - something where a character has to use humor to navigate the absurdities of life.