Catherine Hardwicke Quotes

I've always been slightly hesitant about generalizing movies made by men and women being different in their nature; I think movies by each director are different. Having said that, I think that it's kind of disgraceful that there aren't more female directors.

I was working at a restaurant, I booked the role in 'Twilight,' put in my two weeks' notice, got fitted, flew to Portland, filmed, and then it started getting hype. That helped me get my foot into certain doors before the movie even came out.

It's about balance. Do a movie that's good for your career, then do a one that gets good box office.

That's the way this business works: if your movies do well at the box office, you will be offered more movies. It doesn't matter if you're a nice guy or you're a prick. If your movies do well, there's a job waiting for you in Hollywood. It's not any more complicated than that.

When I came to Hollywood, I would take the opportunity to get to know George Stevens or Willy Wyler or Billy Wilder or Freddie Zinnemann. David Lean I got to know, of course, in London. And David Selznick and Darryl Zanuck, not to mention Jack Warner, and Sam Goldwyn was actually very, very nice to me.

Ultimately, mentorship plays such a big role in breaking directors that successful male directors tend to reach the helping hand to guys who remind them of themselves. We need more women directors so they can reach out to girls who remind them of themselves.

Directing is a rarefied business. And you see very few women pass that Rubicon.

I do all these panels where people are always talking about the lack of female directors, and I have a lot of opinions on that.

I don't think a heroine-oriented film has the capacity to pull an audience like a hero-oriented film in any film industry.

Even if my movies weren't big blockbusters, directors generally liked me, so they would fight for me.

Sometimes people are surprised to learn that most of the films I've made don't work. They've been released but nobody has ever seen them. Maybe 40 percent of them are very successful. That's a very high percentage; most people have maybe 10 or 15 percent of their films work.

We enjoyed such amazing success on Sex and the City. You don't expect success on that level, it was such a big deal, and it was so intense and wonderful that it is hard for anything else to live up to it, quite frankly. So now I just try to have fun and work with interesting people. I think that there is a perception that certain films won't be popular. So it was great that The Devil Wears Prada did really well.

Why would people have confidence in a female director when there are so few?

The main thing about awards in movies is that they can serve as an economic surge for the film. If you're movie gets nominated for any award it does it a big favour. People might go and see it again... they won't give up on it.

Joe Roth, who ended up becoming president of 20th Century Fox, he was the producer of Our Winning Season. This was one of his first movies. It's just a really great, great little film, a lot of good people in it. I don't know whatever happened to that movie, and why it didn't get the success it deserves.

It's always a shock to the people who run studios when a movie that is for women is a hit. They have an infinite capacity to be shocked.

If you made a movie that no man in the world went near, but every woman in the world went to, you'd have the highest grossing movie of all time. You'd make trillions of dollars. But I don't want to make movies that are just for the ladies. I don't want to ghettoize any audience that way.

This business is hard. People and producers and studios and finance guys get caught up in saying, "Women don't sell movies," or "This person doesn't sell foreign," or "You have to attach guys first," or "People don't want to see women do this." I've heard those things so many times that I've actually heard myself say them, a number of times.

People think women directors are tough. Truth is, I'm a pussycat and I hate conflict. I just want everyone to be happy on set.

What I'm realizing as I get older is that a movie's mainstream success is just as unpredictable as a movie's cult success. Plenty of movies that are truly odd and deserve cults, don't have cults. It's just as much of a crapshoot to be a cult hit as it is to be a mainstream success. Isn't that weird?

At the end of the day, regardless of whether you're doing a huge budget film or a small budget film, you still want the film to do well, and have people see it. That's the whole point. You want to put some kind of message into your films, and you want people to see it.

Behind the cameras, there's a different problem, which I think is not unconscious gender bias. It's probably categorized more as conscious gender bias. Because everybody's known the numbers for decades. Nobody's stunned to hear there are very few female directors, only 4 or 7 percent. Everybody knows, but it doesn't change anything. It doesn't make people say, "Wow! We should change that." Nothing happens. It's utterly stagnant.

The thing that changes your professional life, your capabilities, your learning, your understanding, your opportunity flow, your ability to make things happen, is the center relationships you have with powerful and effective people around you in the industry, in the activity that you want to be doing.

You can make five massive hits in a row and still not get cast by the directors who you want to work with doing little movies.