Quotes from Susanna Fogel

I didn't have a lot of men to ask questions of when I was starting out. There were two female directors people suggested I talk to when I was starting out, and they were Nancy Meyers and Kathryn Bigelow.

I was a heathen Jewess with no bat mitzvah. Only the neurosis, the brown hair, and the self-deprecating humor. But being one of the only Jewish kids in my WASPy hometown definitely informed my perspective on the humor of being an outsider.

I have these wonderful friends, and they're supportive and loving, and you can really be yourself around them in a way some people even can't with their partners.

Any place where the Jewish district is the hipster district is a very surreal and awesome place.

As a consumer, I love action movies and have a lot of opinions about how action comedies don't really do justice to what I find exciting about an action movie, which is the genuine thrill of watching something that feels really high-stakes. A lot of times, it's played for laughs and action, which waters down the sense of danger.

So many of my favorite stories, in any medium, are about friendship. Those relationships are so often just as emotional and complex as any romantic or family dynamics, and yet there's a dearth of resonant, grounded films about platonic bonds in American films.

I feel like most movies about female friends derive their conflict from an extension of the high school movie rivalries, or there's some petty grievance: a competition over a guy or a wedding date or something. And I don't relate to any of that.

When I was in high school, I was writing a lot. I dealt with my high school angst by writing short plays and short films. I was obsessed with reading 'Entertainment Weekly' and 'Premiere' and 'Movieline' and all those magazines.

Have confidence in your own voice, be entrepreneurial, and take big risks with the knowledge that, by default of being a woman, people are going to advise you to be conservative, play it safe, make sure everyone likes you, and constantly question whether or not you're ready to be in charge.

The older I got, the less pretentious I got in my art tastes and work.

Economics drive the creative, and for a long time, movies about men were just considered 'movies,' whereas movies about women were considered niche and only appealing to women. This is to an extent still true, and what it does is represent movies about women as less profitable.

After my first film, I was having trouble finding a second film. I had a lot of attempts that failed.

I studied English in college and approached filmmaking from a writing background while trying to learn as much as I could about the technical side of things by making shorts and a webseries.

In Providence, we didn't have a first-run movie theater. But we did have an indie movie theatre on the Brown campus. That was the theater we'd go to. I think, as highbrow as it sounds, that I grew up on the films.

Our friendships are really the epicenter of our social world and emotional lives.

It's become my lifetime passion as a writer to try to show female friendships in the way that I see them, which is as emotional and connected and deep.

It's been increasingly hard to make small stories about female friendship, and, definitely, those stories don't have any shot of getting a theatrical release.

You can have a lot of destruction, but in a realistic female movie, the women are going to be aware of that destruction and apologizing for it.

I still feel, when I meet actresses, no matter how high-profile they are, that they are starved for good roles.

When the mumblecore 'Tiny Furniture' thing happened, it reminded me of the thing we were trying to do in my little 1995 way.

Friendships have been such an important part of my life both emotionally and logistically.

We're so used to seeing women in movies about a romance where they don't seem to have any inner fortitude. They're completely defined by their relationships, and it's hard to engage with those characters and relate to them.

As women, I think we're used to looking around to see what people think about this, who's approving of us, who's criticizing us, and whether we have to internalize their thoughts on us.

I'm a writer-director originally from Rhode Island, now living in Los Angeles. I've spent the past eleven years working with a writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and am now making the transition into feature directing thanks to this script we wrote together and our incredible producer Jordana Mollick.