Quotes

I'm no longer convinced theatrical is the holy grail.

It's a frustrating business sometimes. When you've been pushing an executive to read something for ages and they won't, or an actor commits to your project and then at the last minute uncommits.

What people expect from a Killer film [her production company] is a degree of originality, provocativeness and a kind of bravado.

I would never ever criticize them [directors] in front of anyone else, because if the crew and the actors don't respect the director, you're screwed as a producer. Ultimately when I throw myself behind a movie, I have to really believe in that director's vision.

Being on a set where the director has lost control is just sickening. No one goes the extra mile, there's a lot of eye-rolling ... it just breeds inertia. If a director is in control, the crew follow their leader. But the second anyone senses the directors are not sure, people just swoop in.

In my experience there are two kinds of difficult directors. The first is a gigantic pain in the ass about perfection - these directors have a clear sense of their vision and won't compromise, but it's all about making the movie as good as it can be, so I can handle it. The other kind freaks out about the perks - their trailer isn't as big as it should be or their ride to set isn't good enough-and that I can't brook. If I had a director complaining about a car being too purple, I'd just be like, 'Are you high?'

When I first started making movies, I felt as disenfranchised by the Reagan presidency as I do by the Trump presidency. I felt like Reagan does not care in any way, shape or form about me or my constituency, and I think that forced a kind of filmmaking that had a true sense of urgency. I can't imagine that isn't happening now. [2017]

There were a few years there in the US [in the 1990s] where if you made a movie for the right amount of money and aimed it only at the gay and lesbian audience, you could make your money back. We don't have that captive audience anymore - there are so many different platforms and so many different kinds of storytelling that people can find if that's what they're looking for. [2017]

[on producing Mildred Pierce (2011) for HBO] !t was kind of just making a super-long movie. [2017]

[on her company's biggest success and only profitable feature] Still Alice (2014) is the movie that is sending my daughter to college. It was a big success and an honest company. It's done very, very well for us. (...) For the movie to be financially successful, we knew it sort of had to do exactly what it did, which is to have a potentially Oscar-winning performance and then to win the Oscar. That's threading an insane needle but that was the chance that everybody was taking on the movie. [2017]

Theatrical filmmaking has become a very small part of the narrative storytelling that most of us consume. A lot of what we consider diverse storytelling - storytelling that feels unusual, on the edge, daring - is being made for the small screen now. (...) Companies like Amazon and Netflix should be celebrated for what they're doing. And not just them but Hulu, FX - a lot of companies are taking chances on character-driven drama in a way that theatrical filmmaking simply can't for a variety of reasons. [2017]