There's no glory in climbing a mountain if all you want to do is to get to the top. It's experiencing the climb itself - in all its moments of revelation, heartbreak, and fatigue - that has to be the goal.

A lot of the best suspense operates on a careful withholding of information as opposed to the doling out of information.

Sometimes evil is in the form of a malignant clown, and sometimes evil is in the form of policy and legislators, and sometimes it's a grinning death mask and it has something more viscerally terrifying about it.

Claire Denis's 'Beau Travail' is one of Denis's greatest achievements. One of the most mysterious and beautiful endings in movies.

Best advice: 'Just be yourself.' Worst advice: 'Just be yourself.'

I'm a director first and foremost, and I hope that the fact that I'm female is just one of the many things that informs my unique perspective on the world.

We have to accept that making movies is a never-ending process of occasional progress, frequent setbacks, and unexpected curveballs being thrown our way. Navigating that process requires stamina, curiosity, openness, and creative fire.

Making 'The Invitation' and waiting to make it on my terms and getting final cut and doing it the way I needed to do it was incredibly challenging, but it has really been so great for me. I'm so thankful that that's happened, that I got to work with actors I really like and have just such a good experience in delving into that story.

The genre of horror is really just a way to manage much larger, much more terrifying realities in our daily worlds.

I think there are always going to be people who say, even if they are engaged in the movie, they just want it to move faster.

I guess because there aren't many women working in the kind of variety of spaces that I've had the opportunity and privilege to kind of work in, that there is this extreme scrutiny about my career.

I think the crux of this urgent and real conversation about representation and diversity in art-making and storytelling both behind and in front of the camera ultimately has to do with simply seeing more human perspectives.

I don't think I could have had a better experience than I did with 'Girlfight.' It was a humbling experience to be so well received. And it was equally humbling to be ripped to pieces with 'Aeon Flux.'

I grew up in the Midwest. I understand a sense of the small-town mentality, small-town social politics.

I understand the power of sorrow, and I understand how far it can take us from ourselves if we let it.

What fascinates me is that when we look at the history of women in politics, so frequently the women who get the farthest are the women who are quite conservative in their political views.

I think my narrative is actually pretty interesting if I step back from it and don't engage too much in it, personally or emotionally.

Polanski is a great example of a person whose personal life clearly has been just fraught with scandal and transgression and criminal acts. And yet, in 'Rosemary's Baby,' I think he's made one of the crowning feminist statements in film.

One of the things you hear about when studying the nature of fanaticism is that a lot of the time, people don't start as fanatics. They shift and evolve into that state. That's a process, a systematic process of losing your identity and sense of self.

I do think there's a preoccupation that women understandably have with this idea of the roles we're meant to play and whether or not those roles serve us or ultimately kind of imprison us.

I want to make big movies - but I don't want to have to die a little death every single time I do. Until I meet the people or the studio or the business people who will let me do things a little bit more the way that I need to do them, I probably shouldn't be making big studio movies.

What kind of world is it if we allow people who are violent and do terrible things off the hook? What does that say about the world we're living in - it's like a world upside down, right?

It is important to know what audiences might expect from their genre movies, but I think it is also important to not give them everything they want. As a viewer, I think it can get pretty boring that way.

Horror, almost better than any of the other genres, pits the will to live against the will toward nihilism. I just think that's worth exploring. I don't know what is more important, actually, to explore than that very dynamic.

I think that there's something about short films that just kind of keeps your muscles sharp.

I think most women have to fight very hard for the opportunities they want, which isn't to say that most artists don't have to do that, male or female, but I'm definitely aware of just how difficult it is to find stories that interest me, particularly.

To me, sound is a crucial component to, really, any moviegoing experience, but particularly with suspense films or thrillers. I think you need the audience to become subtly really attuned to the soundscape in, like, this uncomfortable way.

I think being a young female star must be really, really pretty rough.

I don't necessarily believe that stories need closure. I just believe they need a beginning, middle, and end, but the end doesn't have to prevent us from continuing to grapple with the story at hand. It ideally should demand that we remain engaged with the story.

I think that idea that sort of our emotional self and our emotional life is a faucet that you turn on and off, and that we are in control of it entirely, that's a really appealing idea for a lot of people. But there are certainly the times where it's appealing to me, but it never quite works the way I hoped it would.

I don't get to make many features. It's not like that's something I can just snap my fingers and make happen.

Sometimes you realize that the thing an actor is asking for isn't exactly the thing they want. Maybe they're asking for more dialogue, or maybe they want a deep intellectual exploration of their role. But probably what they really need is encouragement.

For me, I guess I feel like the notion of 'feel good' entertainment... I'm all for it, but I just think you really, really, really have to earn it. I'm not sure I have a lot of movies in me where I see a world that earns it.

I just know I have so much to teach my child. And I just feel kind of like, what would our world be without mothers? What would our world be without mother love? I don't think we'd have a world.

I'm ultimately drawn to film many kinds of stories if they are sort of about unlocking the secrets of our human potential.

Making movies, even though it's a business, is also an art, and sometimes you don't hit the bull's-eye.

I'd like to be making more films more frequently, but I do find that making movies, for me, has proven to be an extremely challenging road. No movie is easy; no movie has come together quickly.

I had no shortage of wild times in my youth.

Always keep absorbing art and looking at paintings and reading books and watching movies in other languages, just getting to know the world at hand and the world of the past. It's important to keep absorbing the world and keep engaging with it, and often that means not thinking about movies and thinking about other things.

I would love to make lighter entertainments that have you sort of hopping and skipping and jumping out of the theater, but part of me just doesn't know how much I believe in that, as much as I want to.

For me, there's something about a certain kind of genre film that has real potency in its emotional landscape.

I have had to really grapple with the fact that, while I wish things could be different at times, I ultimately needed to experience the transformation that comes with pain and loss and sorrow.

I think there's a reason why some companies have such dismal records. It's not because they're clueless; it's because they systematically don't want to hire women.

I was in a very lucky position to be able to consider studio films and had decided to not go that route for a very long time until I read a script that I loved called 'Aeon Flux.'

For me, I feel like I don't see myself as all that different from other humans as a woman, but I'm surprised by how frequently I'm asked to see myself differently.

The short form, for those people who can master it - and I am by no means one of them - it is very admirable, because it is really hard to tell stories that can stick with the audience and still be between 5 and 30 minutes long. I think it's a real challenge.

'The Invitation' is a meditation on grief and loss carried within a suspense drama. At its core, it's about a dinner party gone horribly wrong and about the consequences of denying our pain.

I feel like, generally, the golden eras of cinema seem to be in moments of incredible political turmoil and strife and struggle.

I was lucky to work with Gamechanger Films, who are a consortium of investors financing films directed by women. This is a company that puts their money where their mouth is.

It's freeing to be able to consistently make creative decisions and ask creative questions of the team without feeling like, 'Does this make me vulnerable to getting canned?' That's a big part of being in a studio - they can always fire you.