Debra Granik

“I like to make films about how people survive living in the United States.”

“American film isn't just film and glamor and fame and the lives of people who are fortunate financially. Those aren't the only stories in this vast nation. That's my mandate.”

“History has shown that there needs to be some agora, or public spaces, and I think that we already live a lot of our life on a laptop, or even smaller devices that we hold in our hands.”

“We're always on the search for a novel or a source or an existing screenplay, or writing something ourselves that turns us on. But because films cost a lot of money to make and a huge amount of effort to get the people to rally, you have to really like it; you can't just semi-like it. Getting to 'really like' is the part that takes the minute.”

“There has to be a continuation of the communal experience of filmgoing.”

“I have, obviously, a very complex relationship with the more industrial side of filmmaking and the machinery that can take an actor or an actress and create something so bamboozling and monumental and fathomless in terms of publicity hits.”

“Stereotypes are convenient. And yet within them, everyone will say there's something that - you know, they don't come for no reason. It's just that it takes time to explore complexity.”

“Some people have these small, positive schemes for survival, a kind of strength that I am attracted to, maybe because I'm prone to the blues.”

“There are documentaries that will just save your life and be the conduit to the art form you started out loving.”

“In the U.K., working-class lives are depicted with the characters' humour, but in the U.S., people with difficulties are often depicted with pious or simply dreary lives.”

“I will always face the conundrum that the subjects I'm attracted to aren't essentially commercial.”

“Social realism takes research.”

“Our necks are getting injured from looking down, and the movie screen gives you opportunity to look up, you know? It gives you an opportunity to possibly have a discussion with someone afterwards.”

“The time that it takes to make the feature is really contingent on the feature being sort of almost ready-made - so coming to a book is more ready-made. You at least have the story that someone sorted out.”

“For documentaries, I think streaming plays an amazing role, but it's a problem when the one service you initially relied on to have an incredible buffet - 'Come and see a lot of world cinema, and the lives of ordinary people as well' - all of a sudden is narrowed down until it's just gladiator after gladiator - and bloodlust.”

“I don't want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, 'Hey people, hey people!'”

“I swing with a lot of torque from non-fiction to fiction, and I really like that place in between.”

“People need meeting places. You need places where ideas get exchanged and you see each other's faces once in a while.”

“A role is never just a ready-made thing.”

“Humour is the be-all and end-all medicine of human existence.”