Debra Granik

“You can't make movies without known names, and unknowns can't become known, because they can't get work.”

“Sometimes you get ensnared by an idea, and it's what I call 'the sticky burr': You go hiking, and a burr sticks to you, and that's the film you're going to make.”

“The protagonist in 'Winter's Bone' was a really good role for a female. She was strong; she didn't have to conform to something or be a sidekick to any man. That's part of what you're responding to; it's a woman-centric situation. Her value in the film was not reliant on any man.”

“When I read Daniel Woodrell's novel 'Winter's Bone,' I was drawn to the characters, the setting, and the sound of the dialog.”

“When men's lives become extremely hard, women learn how to deal with them and assist them but also develop quiet systems of coping and managing.”

“No one has a green light when they start a documentary - not ever.”

“The challenge for me is to make sure I've done my work. To make sure not every scene is quiet, that other scenes rise up, that there's different tension.”

“I bring forward stories from the lives of everyday Americans: those whose path hasn't been set out on easy street or who haven't been given it all, those who are actually forging ahead because of their own personal resources, their moxie, their survival instincts.”

“I think, in some ways, that is the balm of stories, of fables, of tales: it's the way we're wired. We have always needed to distill what we're going through and try to understand it by looking either backwards or forwards. And the hardest is to look in the now.”

“You will never go wrong with actually photographing process. It's primitive. Humans love to see the bipedal animal in us finish things. We just like it!”

“I need and want to see capable women. I don't like to see them weep all the time.”

“Time's up on cheesy, lesser, boring roles for females in the stories that we try to tell.”

“I get very caught up in the day-to-day and immersed in the scenes as they unfold. It's harder for me, as I'm filming, to see the larger story.”

“I'm doing my best to stay off that financing scheme that relies on this one strip of capital, which is the red carpet. And - no sob story - but it's hard. It takes a while.”

“You gotta call it out first; it always has to be called out when we need social change, but this is how social change happens: you call it out. People had to call out child labor. People had to call out, 'Hey time's up; we need to vote. We live in this country.' People had to call out 'time's up' on enslaving people, you know.”

“There's all these costs of war, and they're huge and long-lasting. It's not just the numbers CNN broadcasts. And we never want to pay the VA bill; we never want to pay the bill to take care of these warriors after we applaud their sacrifice.”

“Action films don't speak to me, because that's not my skill set. I also have a lot of stipulations about stories I don't want to perpetuate, ones that bring me down or make me feel like life's not worth living.”

“Make your film for the least amount you can.”

“I come from what they call the land of nowhere. I'm from the suburb. It's extremely atomizing.”

“I'm from the East Coast, and so therefore, the Pacific Northwest forest is very exotic land to me.”