You can't just pill away injuries that go deep in someone. They don't just stop those feelings from existing.
The questions that loom can be intimidating. 'What kind of moves is she gonna make? What is she gonna do?' There is this pressure that you're supposed to keep impressing.
We just started filming 'Stray Dog' really close to the finishing of 'Winter's Bone,' down in Southern Missouri.
'Winter's Bone' really suited having a lower budget. It would be so hard rolling into a rural setting, a place where people are poor, and to be thinking you've got $10 million to make a piece of entertainment.
I think, in some ways, that is the balm of stories, of fables, of tales: it's the way we're wired. We have always needed to distill what we're going through and try to understand it by looking either backwards or forwards. And the hardest is to look in the now.
Film is a team thing. There is no auteur.
I'm doing my best to stay off that financing scheme that relies on this one strip of capital, which is the red carpet. And - no sob story - but it's hard. It takes a while.
I'm always looking for instances of people doing things for and with each other for pleasure, for passion, for camaraderie, from kindness. It's the anthropology of people figuring how to punctuate life with the lyrical.
No one has a green light when they start a documentary - not ever.
I get very caught up in the day-to-day and immersed in the scenes as they unfold. It's harder for me, as I'm filming, to see the larger story.
There's all these costs of war, and they're huge and long-lasting. It's not just the numbers CNN broadcasts. And we never want to pay the VA bill; we never want to pay the bill to take care of these warriors after we applaud their sacrifice.
In documentary, mostly, people are going to say untoward things; people are going to have gnarly beliefs. People aren't perfect.
It's risky to show poor Americans. People see it as a downer. But I really wanted to make a tightly wound piece of storytelling that also happened to explode the myth of American affluence.
I'm interested in the lives of Americans for whom the ways this culture has tried to define itself - that is, self-esteem defined by material wealth - they have nothing to do with that.
Every filmmaker has this short book of films that don't get made - for a whole host of reasons.
The social-media discourse is very different from what it might be on the ground. It's easy to bloviate without having to look anyone in the eye and then having those sentiments swell and amplify and go viral.
I'm always searching to learn more about our large and diverse country.
I swing with a lot of torque from non-fiction to fiction, and I really like that place in between.
Action films don't speak to me, because that's not my skill set. I also have a lot of stipulations about stories I don't want to perpetuate, ones that bring me down or make me feel like life's not worth living.
Some people have these small, positive schemes for survival, a kind of strength that I am attracted to, maybe because I'm prone to the blues.
