Quotes from Marielle Heller

I don't look like the way we've painted directors in our movies and everything since forever. I don't look like an old white guy in a baseball cap. So, yes, there are always moments when people are surprised that I'm the director.

Scott Frank and I are director friends. We met through the Sundance Labs and he's advised me on my first projects - I've visited him on set, we've shared first cuts with each other, and we're more like director pals than anything else.

It's advice I always give to directors when they're starting out: Take an acting class to really see what it feels like to be an actor. And I have always felt like one of my strengths as a director is that I share a language and a vocabulary with actors.

Our culture of the Bay Area is a place where you want to be different. You want to be seen. You want to be heard.

What Mr Rogers was offering to children were lessons we all need in our world right now: patience, kindness, acceptance and true self-reflection.

I think acting helps me as a director no matter what. There is something about being reminded about the vulnerability it takes to be an actor and what I'm really asking of actors every day when I'm on set as a director that I think it's a really good reminder.

Just make things, and find people you love working with. If you're working on something you truly love and are passionate about, you will do your best work.

I went to Sundance Labs, and I definitely watched my male peers from there have very different meetings than I was having, very different outcomes. You could tell there was a feeling that a young male director had this exciting potential and a young female director was risky.

Molly Ringwald's characters always had a complex personal life, and I appreciated that.

I know I dressed way too provocatively when I look back. I was in that weird phase of feeling suddenly like my body was a woman's body and not a kid's body.

I come from theater and captured theater has a bad rap of being never what the live performance was.

When I do interviews about movies I direct, I often talk about how my superpower as a director is that I'm an actor. I can talk to actors. I'm not afraid of actors.

It's funny because you start watching Mister Rogers so young, it's sort of in this subliminal part of your brain. I think that's why people have such a visceral reaction to him.

My normal way of filming something is, like, one camera, very well planned out, knowing exactly how we're going to get each shot.

I guess I always view movies as, in their best form, connecting us more to each other and to humanity.

A lot of us as adults haven't learned how to cope with our feelings, deal with our anger or work through the pain of our childhoods.

I'm getting more and more used to the fact that being a director and being a woman are two things that everyone wants to talk about, because it's so rare.

The more women directors that get hired, the more practices will shift, top down.

It feels like there are two very different parts to making movies. There's the making of it and then there's the putting out of it - and I like the making of the movies a lot more than putting it out into the world.

I remember thinking when I set out to direct my movie that it was all about lenses and the shots you were going to get. Really, directing is about tapping into what makes us the most human, telling stories, emotions, and managing a group of empathetic people.

When you're directing, you look around and you think, everything I see is my responsibility. From the catering being on time to whether the clouds are moving the way I need them to move to whether this actor is giving the performance I want to whether the costumes are what they should be.

I think all the actors I've worked with knew that I was an actor. Like, I get into the dirt with my actors and we figure out the rhythm of the scene and how it needs to sound and what the blocking is, the way you would with another actor.

You want to make movies about extraordinary people, but those extraordinary people have to have a huge journey.

I love human beings, and I love their faces.