Susanna Fogel

“I have felt that there's a lot of receptiveness to female stories now. I think some of it has a little bit - a lot of it is economically driven and driven by, just, kind of studios wanting to check that box because now they know they have a woman problem that they need to solve.”

“Anything that feels like good characters, I am excited to do whether I write it or not. But if I don't find it in the world, I will write it myself.”

“On 'The Spy Who Dumped Me,' it wasn't fear as much as it was feeling overwhelmed because there were so many moving parts. But I felt that I knew what I was doing. And on a movie like this, there's so much preparation that goes into it that by the time you were there, you had done months of planning.”

“I still feel, when I meet actresses, no matter how high-profile they are, that they are starved for good roles.”

“I was a heathen Jewess with no bat mitzvah. Only the neurosis, the brown hair, and the self-deprecating humor. But being one of the only Jewish kids in my WASPy hometown definitely informed my perspective on the humor of being an outsider.”

“Sometimes my friends and I are sill,y and sometimes we're serious, and sometimes we're emotional, and sometimes we're not.”

“I studied English in college and approached filmmaking from a writing background while trying to learn as much as I could about the technical side of things by making shorts and a webseries.”

“I was constantly reading books about how to direct, and asking directors, 'How do you do it?' And when I finally actually started doing the work, it seemed like you have to be decisive and have an opinion. But also you have to be a good collaborator and hire the right people to shore up whatever your skill set is.”

“When you're watching a Bond movie, if there's a violent death, there's something about cleverly chosen twists, or what props are used, or some way that he's doing something that feels like an ironic twist, that feels like it gives the audience permission to enjoy watching it and to enjoy watching something that's otherwise just brutality.”

“Our friendships are really the epicenter of our social world and emotional lives.”

“Culturally, as women, we're raised to be very concerned with others' approval in a way that men aren't, but an inevitable part of directing and being visionary is that you have to be a boss, and as such, not everyone is going to like you all the time or agree with your choices.”

“After my first film, I was having trouble finding a second film. I had a lot of attempts that failed.”

“Micro humor is a joke that's contained in the writing: it's a punch line, it's a turn of phrase, it's something that you can see on the page, and no matter who's saying it, it is, in and of itself, a funny line.”

“My writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and I love studying girl friendships in particular because they seem defined by a combination of codependent intimacy and subtle, constant passive-aggressiveness.”

“Macro humor is just a person being themselves in a situation, saying whatever they're going to say, and it's funny because of the situation and who they are, or they say something, and it's just so them.”

“As women, I think we're used to looking around to see what people think about this, who's approving of us, who's criticizing us, and whether we have to internalize their thoughts on us.”

“If you're a filmmaker who grew up wanting to make a movie for people to have that female experience of sitting in the theater together, it's hard to do unless you can compete with the bigger spectacles that are being offered to them.”

“The older I got, the less pretentious I got in my art tastes and work.”

“I think it's good that we're talking about it, but I think there's still a gendered nature to the way that people see female directors' skill sets. And I think we need to keep examining that. I don't know if people know how complicated the issue really is.”

“I'm a writer-director originally from Rhode Island, now living in Los Angeles. I've spent the past eleven years working with a writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and am now making the transition into feature directing thanks to this script we wrote together and our incredible producer Jordana Mollick.”