Our necks are getting injured from looking down, and the movie screen gives you opportunity to look up, you know? It gives you an opportunity to possibly have a discussion with someone afterwards.
History has shown that there needs to be some agora, or public spaces, and I think that we already live a lot of our life on a laptop, or even smaller devices that we hold in our hands.
I think one thing that's always a concern to me is you see a role, and you're not seeing the character; you're seeing so-and-so do it. Then I'm taken out of the story considerably, personally.
It's kind of a test when you read a novel thinking about its potential for the screen: How does it play on your mind's screen?
Make your film for the least amount you can.
A big part of the equation for 'Winter's Bone' was making it for so little that we owe nobody. We had a guaranteed loan and were able to pay it back.
Social realism takes research.
What does it really mean to have something change in you very late in your life, after you've structured your life in a different way? What does it mean to be someone who has had a history of sometimes reckless living, and then to really want to change yourself?
I will always face the conundrum that the subjects I'm attracted to aren't essentially commercial.
There's a lot of journalism about poverty, but sometimes it just helps to see that there's a real person who becomes a real mom, who is working with unsustainable wages that could eventually destroy her.
I would fail if I had to work with stars. And I also can't afford to work that way. I can't afford to have special circumstances for rarified individuals. So, I work with actors who have given me a sign that they're willing to work in these more humble circumstances, in real-life locations.
It's funny: your happiness is contingent on a bigger picture besides just yourself.
I'm someone who's always looking for hope - if there's a ray of hope, a shrapnel, shred, a flake of hope - because I take the misfortune or hard times of others very seriously.
My ego is one thing. Of course I want people to like what I do. Of course. There's no doubt. You wouldn't do it. But I think what people don't fully know is how responsible you feel for so many entities. So many hardworking people who've collaborated.
I feel like reality TV has thrown a difficult wrench in the system - on the programming and making side, and on the curating side - which is that we now have a higher threshold for the salacious. We have a higher threshold, unprecedented, for fast, cheap, and out of control.
There are documentaries that will just save your life and be the conduit to the art form you started out loving.
I always think that my assignment is to seek out stories that are experienced by people who don't get the ticket for Easy Street.
The struggle to have a living wage doesn't come easy. You're ready to work, you want it, you seek it... but it's not like it's just given to you.
For whole swaths of people, that map of, 'Come along this way, come to college, do this and that,' isn't offered.
The time that it takes to make the feature is really contingent on the feature being sort of almost ready-made - so coming to a book is more ready-made. You at least have the story that someone sorted out.
