Quotes

If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It's irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don't. There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible. It is.

[on Strange Days (1995)] If you hold a mirror up to society, and you don't like what you see, you can't fault the mirror. It's a mirror. I think that on the eve of the millennium, a point in time only four years from now, the clock is ticking, the same social issues and racial tensions still exist, the environment still needs reexamination so you don't forget it when the lights come up. Strange Days (1995) is provocative. Without revealing too much, I would say that it feels like we are driving toward a highly chaotic, explosive, volatile, Armageddon-like ending. Obviously, the riot footage came out of the LA riots. I mean, I was there. I experienced that. I was part of the cleanup afterwards, so I was very aware of the environment. I mean, it really affected me. It was etched indelibly on my psyche. So, obviously, some of the imagery came from that. I don't like violence. I am very interested, however, in truth. And violence is a fact of our lives, a part of the social context in which we live. But other elements of the movie are love and hope and redemption. Our main character throws up after seeing this hideous experience. The toughest decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It's not that I condone violence. I don't. It's an indictment. I would say the film is cautionary, a wake-up call, and that I think is always valuable.

I always want to make films. I think of it as a great opportunity to comment on the world in which we live. Perhaps just because I just came off The Hurt Locker (2008) and I'm thinking of the war and I think it's a deplorable situation. It's a great medium in which to speak about that. This is a war that cannot be won, why are we sending troops over there? Well, the only medium I have, the only opportunity I have, is to use film. There will always be issues I care about.

You cast not for marquee value but for performance and talent. The right actor for the part. Anything else is a compromise.

[on The Hurt Locker (2008)] War's dirty little secret is that some men love it. I'm trying to unpack why, to look at what it means to be a hero in the context of 21st-century combat.

Usually what happens is there will be an urgency, and then I can do nothing else but that. [But] events like this [the killing of Osama bin Laden] only come along once or twice in a millennium.

[on Zero Dark Thirty (2012)] I feel we got it right. I'm proud of the movie, and I stand behind it completely. I think that it's a deeply moral movie that questions the use of force. It questions what was done in the name of finding [Osama bin Laden].

Once you've opened the window on topical material, its very hard to close it. Holding up a contemporary mirror is more attractive to me now than ever.

[in Aug. 2017, on Detroit (2017)] [The Algiers Hotel events have] been shrouded in secrecy for so many years. Hopefully, in bringing this story to light, a number of things may happen. Other stories may come forward, or a meaningful story about race may develop in this country [ . . . ] Think of South Africa--they have a very robust conversation about truth and reconciliation. We don't have that here. It feels like the race issue is relegated to a single community to fix. We all share responsibility towards its resolution or amelioration.

[in Aug. 2017, on the lack of female filmmakers in Hollywood] It's a travesty. I feel like it's trending in the right direction, but it's painfully slow, and where's that inequity coming from? That's a big and complicated sociological question.

[in 2017, on Barry Jenkins] He is one of the rare artists who [is] willing to look into the deeper places of themselves and society in order to provide a lens through which we may discover the humanity at our core. And he has come to the attention of the world at precisely the right moment, just when we most need someone to give voice to those who have not been heard.

[in Aug. 2017, on Detroit (2017)] James Baldwin said, "Nothing can be changed until it is faced". And in America, there seems a radical desire not to face the reality of race. So these events keep replaying.

[in 2017, on why she moved from fine art to feature films] I knew film had the potential to cross all lines of culture and class. That excited me.

I saw The Wild Bunch on a double bill with Mean Streets, midnight at the Waverly Place Cinema on Bleecker Street in New York [in the 1970s]. Those two played on a double bill; I was in New York, I had a studio and I was basically a practicing artist, working with various art groups - Art & Language, kind of conceptual arts, political arts. We were doing environments, we were doing installations, performance pieces...and I stumbled into this incredible double bill. And it was a life-changing experience. I thought they were just extraordinary. [Sam] Peckinpah for his muscularity, his immediacy, his sheer genius in his storytelling and characters. I was knocked out...and then [in Mean Streets], Robert De Niro; his kind of twitchy reverence to this wonderfully insane underworld. Somehow, the two [films] will always be forever linked in my mind. Whoever programmed those two movies together... it was at a moment when, in an art context, I was beginning to make short films. So film was definitely becoming a medium that was intriguing to me, and I hadn't quite made a complete transition yet, but I found those two films just extraordinary, and they opened up a kind of unimaginable landscape for me. That kind of great irreverence, and intensity, and strength of purpose in those characters.