Quotes from Niki Caro

You can start making films as a child. It's become easier to find your groove as a filmmaker, and I'm extremely interested in those voices.

As a kid I was always barefoot, always outside and as an adult I always want to be outside.

It's interesting - the things you remember about Chariots of Fire is the slow running on the beach and the Vangelis music.

I do commit really, really passionately. It's why I only work every five years. It's exhausting.

I really value the skill and sensitivity of my collaborators, and I am really interested in - perhaps more so than if I was a male director - the hair, makeup and the textures of the fabric and the wallpaper.

I recognised that femininity and strength are not mutually exclusive, and I think that femininity has often been equated with weakness, but we know it's not.

You know, what is so curious about being a director is that you never get on anybody else's set and see how they do things.

I think a lot of action films, and I'm just saying this as a moviegoer, the default setting on action films seems to be how could it be cooler?

A film like 'Whale Rider' is equally truthful, perhaps more so, to the Maori experience; Maori people respond to 'Whale Rider' because it's a world that they understand.

Whale Rider' was a very authentic and specific movie about the indigenous culture from where I come. Amazingly, by the fact it was so authentic and so specific, it became really powerfully universal.

I made 'Whale Rider', I saw that to be specific and authentic is to be universal, and I've continued to work in an identical way ever since.

With every film I've made, 'Whale Rider' included, I've had a vision that was far bigger than the budget allowed.

Fundamentally, the way I work is exactly the same whether I'm making 'Whale Rider' or 'Mulan'. And those two stories are somewhat similar. They have interesting parallels, and it felt like I'd really come full circle, back to a story of leadership.

When I made 'Whale Rider' - of course, I'm not Maori and have no business, as a white girl, telling people how to be in this movie - I started by learning the language, as best I could.

The Maori culture is different than our culture where we're most likely to introduce ourselves by email or fax and we conduct a lot of business in an impersonal way, whereas for Maori, the only way to do it is to make the pilgrimage and sit down face-to-face and have some tea.

I'm primarily interested in examining human issues.

It's a privilege to tell stories on film. It can be a great community to live a professional life. All of us that do this work should feel very grateful that we can.

There's so many movies, they're just like fast food you consume them and you can't even remember what you just ate. I don't want to make those kinds of movies. I want to make the slow food of movies.

We don't tend to break into song when we go to war.

Look what I know about directing; is it goes beyond gender. You might see some qualities that are inherently female in the great male directors.

I'm very conscious of what I consider to be the first audience of any movie that I make. It's those people whose reactions I'm most attentive to. They're the ones who will tell me whether I've done my job or not.

I've had my best experience as a filmmaker with true stories about real people and real cultures.

I believe that the debate of 'Who should tell indigenous stories?' is very important. It's something that should be talked about. I'm totally up for that and if my work can be part of that debate, I'm thrilled.

God knows nobody hated running more than me. Because I was writing and rewriting the script, I thought that I'm going to have to run because I'm going to have to know what it feels like to run.