Quotes from Catherine Hardwicke

You don't watch 'A Beautiful Mind' and say, 'This is how every mathematician is.'

The boys in junior high get really lewd and say outrageous stuff to the girls. If somebody yelled the stuff at me that I've heard at junior high schools I've visited, I'd be scared and humiliated.

I don't like the sterility of the casting office.

Usually, we have some of those nostalgic moments like, "Oh my god, I can't believe we survived that day," because filmmaking is such a wild roller coaster ride.

Every filmmaker's just going to keep trying to make it the best you can make it: make it as potent and interesting and entertaining and exciting and tough and sexy as you can.

What does 'dating' mean? I don't know. I couldn't say.

A great screenplay makes everybody step up to the bar and deliver.

Some directors I worked with didn't even know how to read a blueprint, understand a plan.

There are some moments where you're so depressed, you cannot see the way, and you're like, 'Whatever. Bite me.' I think all directors feel that way sometimes.

Kids have to experiment a little or figure out where they belong.

As a director, you've got to have quite a few projects going because you never know which one will actually come together with the financing and get the green light.

If you decide to tell a kid that looks don't matter, she can prove you wrong every day. Because they see it everywhere. That is age-old, going back to the Greeks, but now we're bombarded nonstop.

You're fearless when you're a kid.

Back in medieval times, Victorian repression hadn't come in yet. People were bawdy and wild and more in touch with their true natures. If you look at the Bosch paintings or Bruegel, you see, when people are dancing, they're totally cutting loose.

I don't like to watch a movie where it's just kind of like all one note, dee-dee-dee-dee. I want spikes of adrenaline and highs and lows and exciting tension release.

Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.

Sheep are just psychotic.

There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out.

Starting with 'Thirteen,' my known technique is to cast the lead, then find someone with whom they have incredible chemistry.

My first movie, 'Thirteen,' and it was very real - almost too real. It was very gritty, with raw human emotion. I'd love to do something like that again.

I'll literally pay three Hollywood readers who don't know me to read my scripts under the radar and give cold comments. And at the early screenings of my movies, I'll hand out questionnaires that can be filled out anonymously so people can be brutally honest because, to your face, they won't be.

Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.

When you're in a creative flow with somebody - and I had this back in architecture school - you're just so passionate about what you're doing, and if that other person is just as passionate, you'll be madly in love with them. It's just that thrill of creating.

The script for 'Thirteen' is tight, and not because of the now-famous six day writing spree, but more because it started out as 15 pages longer.