Anna Boden

“I speak Spanish, not perfectly; it's definitely my second language.”

“We can always connect with all of our characters on a human level, but a lot of them took a lot of observation and exploration and talking with people. And we absolutely embrace our actors' perspectives on all that.”

“What gets us excited about any movie is the social relevance and the character themes and the character journeys and like the adventure story.”

“The first time Brie Larson was really on our radar as somebody who we wanted to work with was 'Short Term 12.'”

“The truth is we were never considered for 'Guardians of the Galaxy.' It was misprinted. I think there was another directing team that had been considered.”

“You get told a lot in school to tell what you know, write what you know. But what excites me about filmmaking, about being a storyteller, is being able to learn about other people, putting myself in somebody else's shoes, whether that be someone from the Dominican Republic or someone from Cuba or inner-city Brooklyn.”

“The list of movies that 'Captain Marvel' is a love letter to is very expansive and strange.”

“There are studios out there and we have met them who take the movie away from the filmmaker and don't want them to have input. But that's not with Marvel.”

“It would be great to continue shooting on film. Amongst other things, the mystery of not knowing exactly how it's going to look until we see it later and having your DP and being able to trust in him that he's the holder of how this is going to look is a beautiful mystery of filmmaking I'm loathe to look up.”

“As directors, we get very stuck on the stories we want to tell.”

“Whenever we've approached a story, it's always started with the character, and the idea of some character struggling with some part of himself. That's what gets us in.”

“I mean, I totally believe in magic and superstition.”

“We met Ben Mendelsohn, who had acted with Ryan Gosling in 'A Place Beyond the Pines,' and that's the first place where we'd seen him. And we're embarrassed to say that we didn't know that he was a famous Australian actor at the time that we saw it.”

“I'm a very superstitious person. I come from a long line of superstitious people, so it's not going anywhere. For instance, we have this thing on our movies where if one of the key personnel gets a haircut in the middle of the movie, it's bad luck. I swear by that.”

“I've talked to a lot of directors who direct solo like most directors. And they're always like, 'Oh, man I wish I had somebody I could direct with because it's a lot of work.'”

“You want the character to keep being able to grow through the process of writing, through the process of filming, and editing, you want to discover things about that character.”

“I guess there are women who write from a very woman-centered place, but I don't consider myself to be one of them.”

“We weren't big 'Notebook' fans or anything.”

“We want to push our characters to do things that make us question whether we ought to be their friend or even follow them.”

“I'm one of the most superstitious people I know. There are these two battling parts of me, one is very rational and intellectual, and the other part of me, at my core, I believe in magic in a certain way, and serendipity.”