AVA. Quotes

God knows I've got so many frailties myself, I ought to be able to understand and forgive them in others. But I don't.

I was never an actress -- none of us kids at Metro were. We were just good to look at.

Some black filmmakers will say, "I don't want to be considered a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker." I don't think that. I'm a black woman filmmaker.

Netflix represents, as well as all the streaming services, something that I've been talking about being so important to inclusive voices around films.

I hate cheating. I won’t put up with it. I don’t do it myself.

At the end of the day, I had to remain dedicated to historical accuracy.

I know that there are a lot of great women that have gone before me, so it's important to acknowledge them.

I'm very lonely now, Mary, For the poor make no new friends; But oh they love the better still The few our Father sends!

I thought I was making fifty dollars a week [at MGM], but it turned out to be $35 because twelve weeks of the year you were on layoff. It was white slavery, and it lasted for seventeen years.

For far too long, independent voices have been relegated to places where these ideas are not seen on a mass level.

In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.

When I look in the mirror, I see a woman who is happy.

Those [old] days are gone... accept the reality and do it.

If the double helix was so important, how come you didn't work on It? Ther husband, Linus Pauling, when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Crick, Watson and Wilkins.

I couldn't imagine a better place [Australia] for making a film on the end of the world.

I'm a huge Dirty Dancing fan. I feel like I should be reading [William] Shakespeare, but I'm watching Baby not be in a corner.

Most of us think prison is a place where bad people go - which is what I thought for a long time - until you really start to look inside the system and you see, this is not right.

I don't want to say that in a place that's negative about what the fear is. I just want to be a realist.

Just because love don't look the way you think it should, don't mean you don't have it.

Children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people.

You know, often films that are deemed positive, nobody wants to see them.

To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost.

I think that women definitely have a special bond as friends that is hard to describe to men, and we don't often see that portrayed narratively.

It was easy for me to show the films to the studio and the network and say, "This is who I'm hiring."

When you say cultural icon, I scrunch my nose.

When you force sleep, it doesn't happen.

I just remember not having access to films as a young person who loved films but living in Compton.

We're living based on laws and ideas that we, as a society, embraced back in the days of slavery.

It's very nourishing and collaborative - kind of the true essence of what one would want an artistic collaboration to be [the collaboration with Oprah Winfrey].

My parents [are my hero]. They've helped me be who I am.

All these women had directed movies that I loved on the film festival circuit, but couldn't get a job making television. That's how locked down TV is.

More people have seen 13th on Netflix than have seen all my films put together between the Sundance winners and Selma, and the whole international distribution of film.

I think there are a lot of people in this industry that have the ability, that have the position, they have the opportunity, they have the privilege to call the shots and could do it too.

I think there are pieces of the film [Age Of Trump] that are even more emotionally resonant and more vital to talk about than ever.

The fact that we have people who have headed up oil corporations now assigned to places in cabinet.

I know that sounds a little bit corny, but I've found some solace in that. I hope art can continue to do that for people, I really do.

I feel mushy these days when I think about art and artists and the work that lies ahead for us. There's good work to be done and there's joy to be found in it, I think.

Historically, you've had really muddy, unforgiving, unintentional images of black people.

As long as you're in an environment where the worth of the project isn't based on the project but what its predecessors did, it's not truly inclusive.

I think I am a little jealous of women who have great girlfriends as adults.

All the films I do, I write the scripts, I direct.

Filmmakers need to realize that their job isn't done when they lock picture. We must see our films through.

Film school was a privilege I could not afford.

I tell the stories that are of interest to me.

I wish I could be the black woman Soderbergh, and put the camera on my shoulder and shoot beautifully while I directed.

I thing for female filmmakers a big issue is making their second and third films. You see the statistics, and the dropoff on the second and third [films] , are dire.

I just don't think there's a lot of support for the woman's voice in cinema, and it becomes really difficult to raise that money and start again every time.

I don't understand the iPhone. I just don't get it. Don't ya'll have to write serious emails throughout the day? How can you possibly manage detailed missives on a phone with no keys?

[ Hollywood] is a patriarchy, headed by men and built for men.

I always find it fascinating to ask people, why they've chosen to live their life as an artist? Why be an actor, a singer, an author, a filmmaker? I've heard such inspiring answers to that question.