Patricia Riggen Quotes

It's so exciting to headline a film. It's not every day you see a Latina carrying a full-length feature.

Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.

'True Detective' would not pass The Bechdel Test.

Being a woman in music was fine, but when I wanted to direct, I was poking my head into a man's world.

Even after such milestones as Kathryn Bigelow winning an Oscar, there still seem to be few women in leadership roles.

I don't understand why there aren't more powerful female directors. I don't have the answers, but I hope that things may start to shift and that studios will employ more women to handle strong and interesting material.

To say you want to be a director is to risk sounding obnoxious, pretentious, arrogant, and I think women are more fearful of sounding that way than men are.

Comedy and drama are less ageist media for women than stuff like light entertainment. But in TV or film, women have to be more pleasing on the eye than men.

I get asked why there aren't more female directors all the time. I'm kind of reluctant to talk about it. That's not because I think the question is irrelevant or stupid. It's just that there are so many mitigating factors.

As a result of the feminist revolution, 'feminine' becomes an abusive epithet.

I feel like comedy had a boys'-club label when we were starting.

It never crossed my mind to be a director, and I'll tell you why: because I'm a woman. It just didn't occur to me, but I knew I had to be in film.

Sexism is real.

I think that there are a lot of male writers and directors in Hollywood, and a lot of the female characters you do see are really one-dimensional, but I think that's changing more and more as there are more women taking control in Hollywood.

When you're female working in a male-dominated industry, there are unfortunately extra things you need to do - for example, couch opinions in a way that sounds palatable and not threatening. That's a skill I developed.

I swear, if anyone near me even so much as whispers the sentence 'Women probably don't want to direct,' my fist will fly as a reflex action.

I have been lucky in getting a lot of the projects I've wanted, maybe because I'm really, really driven. But there is a stigma that women can't direct big studio films. Not that I want to do that, but it is a topic that comes up a lot.

Usually, it's men who run these big monster companies, and girl companies are usually much smaller - it's like an unwritten tech-industry stigma.

People would ask for my autograph because they had never seen a woman behind the camera before.

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.

One reason that we have collectively plugged our ears against a decade of dismal revelations about Bill Cosby is that he made lots of Americans feel good about two things we rarely have reason to feel good about: race and gender.

I'd say it's far more challenging to be female and be a showrunner. People are not surprised to see a black person running this show, but the female aspect is the thing that I get asked about.

I was also told some years ago that I shouldn't 'waste my time' with female-centric films because the audience was not ready for it.

It's hard to get yourself into a position where someone will trust you to direct a film anyway, whatever sex you are. Certainly in England, the film set is a very male preserve. There's a lot of very rough looking men pushing equipment around that don't want the gaffer to be a girl.

One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian.