Marielle Heller

“Movies require a minor miracle to get made.”

“I just have no interest in making a biopic. No offence to biopics, it's just not where my mind goes.”

“I love human beings, and I love their faces.”

“I come from the world of theater, and I know Noel Coward's writing well. He has such a specific voice, and was one of the wittiest writers who ever lived, and you think of him in the same category as someone like Shakespeare who's just impossible to imitate.”

“I think all the actors I've worked with knew that I was an actor. Like, I get into the dirt with my actors and we figure out the rhythm of the scene and how it needs to sound and what the blocking is, the way you would with another actor.”

“It makes white men uncomfortable that there aren't more stories about them because it somehow is perpetuating the idea that they aren't the center of the universe - and they wouldn't give up that position lightly.”

“It's advice I always give to directors when they're starting out: Take an acting class to really see what it feels like to be an actor. And I have always felt like one of my strengths as a director is that I share a language and a vocabulary with actors.”

“The beauty of film is that you can get closer than you can in theater, you know? I come from theater, and I remember feeling like I was almost cheating when I would put the camera so close to somebody's face when I was filming them.”

“I was always seen as defiant. And I did know that as a kid. It just wasn't something that was stamped out of me. I often had problems in school where I would stand up to teachers or I would believe that something they were saying was wrong.”

“A lot of acting is waiting for people to let you do your job.”

“I don't think the purpose of movies is to tell people how to live their lives.”

“I haven't acted in 10 years. I always talk about being an actor, and yet I've been focusing on making movies for a long time.”

“Mr. Rogers would not make a good protagonist of a narrative film. He's without conflict, he's too far along on his journey toward enlightenment to be a good protagonist. Our protagonists have to be struggling with demons in a certain way.”

“You live in an apartment in New York, and you think all the time about like, 'I don't even know who's living above me.' There are all these anonymous people in that window or that window or that window, and everybody has their own interesting life that I know nothing about.”

“I come from theater and captured theater has a bad rap of being never what the live performance was.”

“Seeing yourself reflected on screen is a very important part of being human. It makes us feel less alone, it make us feel more connected to humanity.”

“I feel some responsibility, being one of the few women directors who are being given opportunities. Sometimes, that makes me want to take on some big franchise because I want to show people that women can do it.”

“I so related to John Hughes movies.”

“When I said yes to doing 'Queen's Gambit,' I was feeling burned out on directing and movie-wise wasn't sure what my next big project was going to be. So I said yes to doing this very different type of project that required a different skill set from me, sort of just to shake things up, if anything.”

“But the idea behind French hours is that instead of doing a 12 and a half or 13-hour day with a lunch break in the middle, you do a 10-hour straight day. Everyone kind of eats food throughout the day anyway on the set.”