Quotes from Marielle Heller

I hate the narrative that people have to be tortured in order to be good artists. I think it's a solipsistic view that people use in order to be selfish.

I come from the world of theater, and I know Noel Coward's writing well. He has such a specific voice, and was one of the wittiest writers who ever lived, and you think of him in the same category as someone like Shakespeare who's just impossible to imitate.

One of the movies I know affected me was 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch.' I remember feeling like it was such a brave and scary and awesome movie, and it was so ambitious. I felt really connected to it emotionally.

For the same reason I want to make movies about women, I also want to make movies that help men be better men and that can be an antidote to toxic masculinity.

Movies require a minor miracle to get made.

Somehow I had a lot of the skills that I didn't know were required for directing. I didn't realize that my life had been leading in that direction.

I just don't want to ever make decisions based on something that I feel like I shouldn't do, or if it's a logical career step. It has to be something that inspires me. Because if it's not something that inspires me, then I'm not going to do it well. And that doesn't help anybody.

When I said yes to doing 'Queen's Gambit,' I was feeling burned out on directing and movie-wise wasn't sure what my next big project was going to be. So I said yes to doing this very different type of project that required a different skill set from me, sort of just to shake things up, if anything.

I'm a director... I don't wear any makeup, and wear jeans every day.

I don't think we have to be jerks to make good art either, but somehow we as a society have romanticised that idea.

I spent most of my 20s working as an actor. I started writing and directing because I was frustrated with the types of roles that were available to young women.

I don't think I would have made 'A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood' had Trump not been president. I felt so desperately like we needed to see a model of masculinity that was kind and loving and emotional, and could be the antidote to this president that we had.

Historically, we've attached a lot of shame to women and their bodies - probably since biblical times. It's a way that patriarchal societies have perpetuated.

I don't really believe that all theater needs to be filmed - for some things, the special part of live theater is that it exists and then it's gone.

Actually, Nicole Holofcener's movies have always felt really right to me. 'Lovely & Amazing' is a movie about women's bodies that I feel is so truthful and painful and real.

I do think there's probably a little more opportunity to direct in television, because there are just so many TV shows. In movies, it still feels harder to break in. I do hope that's shifting. The difference between TV and miniseries and movies is also diminishing.

I'm the oldest of three kids and I remember my brother and sister still watching Mr Rogers while I felt too big and too sophisticated to watch it.

I did not grow up in the 70s but in the 80s in the Bay Area, the child of hippies in Berkeley, so I felt connected to the place and the legendary things that had come before me historically that I'd missed.

I have a hard time with films that I feel like I can predict every twist or turn they take from the moment I start reading the script.

It makes white men uncomfortable that there aren't more stories about them because it somehow is perpetuating the idea that they aren't the center of the universe - and they wouldn't give up that position lightly.

Sometimes we need pure relief. Sometimes we need pure escapism. Sometimes we need major reflection on some aspects of our collective unconscious.

I remember my grandmother's husband dying. But I think I was older. I think I was 7 or 8 when he died. But I remember that being the first real person I knew who died, and I - and that my parents didn't let me go to the funeral. And I remember feeling like it was really unfair.

I was always seen as defiant. And I did know that as a kid. It just wasn't something that was stamped out of me. I often had problems in school where I would stand up to teachers or I would believe that something they were saying was wrong.

My five-year-old, before the quarantine, joined a chess class in our neighborhood in Brooklyn, and my husband was learning to play so that they could play against each other.