Peter Hedges

“Everything good in my life can be traced back to my mother's sobriety. She showed me that broken people can - with the help of others - turn themselves around.”

“I try, in my films, to normalize things that maybe 20 or 30 years ago a film would have been about. 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' needed its own film, but now blended families you see all the time.”

“So, yes, I wrote a script called 'Ben Is Back' that I got to make with a bunch of remarkable artists and craftspeople.”

“I'm interested in stories that help me, people navigate in this broken world.”

“He loves to hide, but only if you take the time to find him. And while I suspect that's true for most people, only a retard or a kid would admit it.”

“When you have an intimate encounter with mortality as my family and I did with my mom's death, I took a long look at my life and I asked myself what was the one thing that I hadn't done that I had really wanted to do. And it was to write and direct a film.”

“I used to find limitations frustrating, but I find them enormously liberating.”

“Writing a really good screenplay is not easy. It can be a very punishing form.”

“Lucas is living the life that I wanted, but I want to be clear, I don't feel there's been any pressure for him to live it.”

“I don't know if a mother's love and a father's love is that different.”

“I wouldn't say I'm a religious person, but I am definitely inclined toward asking the big questions.”

“I completely hold on to the idea that people are eager if not desperate to be told a good story.”

“Ultimately what I try to do is work on stories I love with people I admire, and sometimes they get made and sometimes they don't.”

“Who's calling?""Don't insult me like that," the voice says.I stop. Was I just insulting?”

“When I go home to Iowa, people assume I live in this very big anonymous place where no one knows each other or wants to. Truth is, I know my neighbors better in Brooklyn than I ever did in Iowa.”

“One of the great kicks of having a movie made is that you envision this world.”

“I feel cool when I say I live in Brooklyn.”

“And for better or worse, a story like 'Pieces of April' is the kind of story I'm supposed to tell. The kind of story that makes you laugh as much as possible but also breaks your heart.”

“Well, because my films are really about how people interact with each other, and the complexity, and the nuance, and the surprise of those moments I try to create a safe enough space that allows the actors to operate from their own instincts. My direction is more suggestions, prompts or questions.”

“So much of writing is about what characters don't say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.”