Susanna Fogel Quotes

I still feel, when I meet actresses, no matter how high-profile they are, that they are starved for good roles.

You can have a lot of destruction, but in a realistic female movie, the women are going to be aware of that destruction and apologizing for it.

I have these wonderful friends, and they’re supportive and loving, and you can really be yourself around them in a way some people even can’t with their partners.

Friendships have been such an important part of my life both emotionally and logistically.

So many of my favorite stories, in any medium, are about friendship. Those relationships are so often just as emotional and complex as any romantic or family dynamics, and yet there’s a dearth of resonant, grounded films about platonic bonds in American films.

After my first film, I was having trouble finding a second film. I had a lot of attempts that failed.

I feel like most movies about female friends derive their conflict from an extension of the high school movie rivalries, or there’s some petty grievance: a competition over a guy or a wedding date or something. And I don’t relate to any of that.

Anything that feels like good characters, I am excited to do whether I write it or not. But if I don’t find it in the world, I will write it myself.

Have confidence in your own voice, be entrepreneurial, and take big risks with the knowledge that, by default of being a woman, people are going to advise you to be conservative, play it safe, make sure everyone likes you, and constantly question whether or not you’re ready to be in charge.

I didn’t have a lot of men to ask questions of when I was starting out. There were two female directors people suggested I talk to when I was starting out, and they were Nancy Meyers and Kathryn Bigelow.

Micro humor is a joke that’s contained in the writing: it’s a punch line, it’s a turn of phrase, it’s something that you can see on the page, and no matter who’s saying it, it is, in and of itself, a funny line.

I started really idolizing people like Nicole Holofcener and Whit Stillman.

Our friendships are really the epicenter of our social world and emotional lives.

On ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me,’ it wasn’t fear as much as it was feeling overwhelmed because there were so many moving parts. But I felt that I knew what I was doing. And on a movie like this, there’s so much preparation that goes into it that by the time you were there, you had done months of planning.

I have felt that there’s a lot of receptiveness to female stories now. I think some of it has a little bit – a lot of it is economically driven and driven by, just, kind of studios wanting to check that box because now they know they have a woman problem that they need to solve.

Macro humor is just a person being themselves in a situation, saying whatever they’re going to say, and it’s funny because of the situation and who they are, or they say something, and it’s just so them.

Sometimes my friends and I are sill,y and sometimes we’re serious, and sometimes we’re emotional, and sometimes we’re not.

Culturally, as women, we’re raised to be very concerned with others’ approval in a way that men aren’t, but an inevitable part of directing and being visionary is that you have to be a boss, and as such, not everyone is going to like you all the time or agree with your choices.

I was constantly reading books about how to direct, and asking directors, ‘How do you do it?’ And when I finally actually started doing the work, it seemed like you have to be decisive and have an opinion. But also you have to be a good collaborator and hire the right people to shore up whatever your skill set is.

It’s been increasingly hard to make small stories about female friendship, and, definitely, those stories don’t have any shot of getting a theatrical release.

When I was in high school, I was writing a lot. I dealt with my high school angst by writing short plays and short films. I was obsessed with reading ‘Entertainment Weekly’ and ‘Premiere’ and ‘Movieline’ and all those magazines.

I was a heathen Jewess with no bat mitzvah. Only the neurosis, the brown hair, and the self-deprecating humor. But being one of the only Jewish kids in my WASPy hometown definitely informed my perspective on the humor of being an outsider.

I want to be someone who takes risks but also stays engaged by trying new things.

I love watching action films, and especially the little moments of wit and humor in the choreography in a lot of them. The editing of an action sequence often has great moments of comic timing.

I hope that women know that they can and should try everything they’re interested in – with the confidence that men have had.

I’m a writer-director originally from Rhode Island, now living in Los Angeles. I’ve spent the past eleven years working with a writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and am now making the transition into feature directing thanks to this script we wrote together and our incredible producer Jordana Mollick.

When the mumblecore ‘Tiny Furniture’ thing happened, it reminded me of the thing we were trying to do in my little 1995 way.

We’re so used to seeing women in movies about a romance where they don’t seem to have any inner fortitude. They’re completely defined by their relationships, and it’s hard to engage with those characters and relate to them.

I have to say, my family’s always been incredibly open and encouraging of any way I might want to express myself. At a very young age, they accepted that my outlet would be writing, and comedic writing, and they were pretty accepting of that.

If you’re a filmmaker who grew up wanting to make a movie for people to have that female experience of sitting in the theater together, it’s hard to do unless you can compete with the bigger spectacles that are being offered to them.