Ava DuVernay Quotes

I grew up thinking there was something called 'independent film,' which I wouldn't necessarily have had access to if there wasn't Sundance.

Indie movies got co-opted by the studio system. The studios insisted that only stars could make movies successful.

When I went to Sundance back in 1998, indie film was all the rage, and Miramax was throwing down five or six million dollars for several films each year. Those were the salad days of indie film, and those days are over. I'm not out there worrying too much about it.

Basically, independent film doesn't exist anymore. It does if you have two or three stars in your film, but it's just very difficult.

I'm not trying to be self-serving, but you know, you get to Hollywood, and if you want to make something big and loud and dumb, it's pretty easy. It's very hard to go down there and make a film like 'Sideways,' which I thought was a great film. They don't want to make films like that anymore, even though that film was very successful.

You could just do independent movies, but I like bigger kind of studio movies, at least some of them.

I always wanted to go to Sundance.

I met Jill Soloway at Sundance a couple years ago. I was there for 'Crystal Fairy', and she was there for 'Afternoon Delight'. She reached out and wanted to get together.

To be honest, you have to do a big Hollywood film to get enough money to do a good independent film!

In the U.S., it would be so much better if the studios made many more smaller films for niche markets rather than a few tent pole films that swamp cinemas and Hoover up all the funding.

'Five Easy Pieces,' 'Easy Rider' - those are indie pictures; those were not studio pictures. They had relationships with studio distribution, but they were indies.

In terms of doing another franchise after 'Transformers,' I don't know if that would be best for me. I'm really happy to inhabit the world of independent film.

I rarely see one of the 'summer blockbuster' movies. I'd like to see a stronger focus on smaller, smarter movies.

I am one day going to be working openly in the motion picture industry. When that day comes, I swear to you that I will never sign a term contract with any major studio.

There are really only a handful of directors who have a final cut clause in Hollywood. You only get that power if you've made a couple of hundred-million-dollar successes.

The only place that I'd be worried about being typecast is the independent film world.

I'm always looking for a reason to say no when I'm approached about a big studio tentpole because your fear is will you be consumed into the anonymous machine, and it will suck out any specificity and point of view that you might hope to express.

In 1962, we created the Filmmakers' Co-Op because nobody wanted to distribute our films. If we had the Internet in those days, we wouldn't have needed the Co-Op.

I don't think Hollywood makes many good films anymore. How many directors can you really trust to have an artistic vision, not a corporate vision or a watered-down communal one?

Sundance took me on my first film and from there sort of launched my career.

Working with David Cronenberg or Darren Aronofsky or even Steven Soderbergh isn't really like a typical Hollywood movie. These are true artists, and have a certain amount of freedom when they work, and they're more like independent filmmakers making their way through big studios.

The Hollywood structure was monopolistic, run by four or five big studios.

When we do a movie with the studios, they wouldn't be asking us to do it, I don't think, if it was a movie they wanted to get into themselves. What you see is what you get with us, so they let us do what we want to do.

It's almost an impossible thing to get a movie made that is written by two actors who want to star in it, when no one knows who they are. The only time it happened that I know of was when Sylvester Stallone did it in 'Rocky.'

What is generally referred to as American-style films are, in fact, studio productions.