Female Filmmakers Quotes

Trailblazers in feminist Porn include female filmmakers like Tristan Taormino and Erika Lust, who make certain that their actors are treated fairly and respectfully. They create sexy, sensual visuals and storylines, and always make certain their actors have chemistry, connection, and real orgasms.

White men's stories continue to be considered Important and Universal. If the films of Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, or Christopher Nolan don't "speak" to you, you are considered by other filmmakers and creatives to be a philistine of the highest order, one who is simply too ignorant to grasp the depth of their genius. But men can hardly be expected to sit through the films of those female filmmakers most radically plumbing the depths of the female experience—Karyn Kusama, Jane Campion, Tamara Jenkins. After all, they are telling "small" and "personal" stories.

When I ask people who work in television why there aren’t more women directing, some privately say they can’t find them. It’s so annoying. I’d like to call on the heads of these companies — Amazon, Netflix, HBO, AMC, etc. — to make it a company mandate to have an equal number of women directing. If you can’t find a woman you like to direct, then damn it, develop the female directors yourselves. The women who can direct are out there. Just call me, I’ll send them over.” Barbara Schock, Filmmaker and chair of the graduate film program, Tisch School of the Arts, N.Y.U.

If we think that these women filmmakers have worked 'in the margins,' it is we who have kept them there.

I started to notice it in French films as well. While the female characters in American films make a ridiculous number of Sex and the City–esque wardrobe changes, in French films, more often than not, you will see the female lead wear the same outfit at least twice during the course of the film. You would never encounter this in American films unless the filmmaker wants to make a point that the character is poor or depressed.

The first time Polly Platt met Jim Brooks to discuss Terms of Endear­ment (1983), she was distinctly unimpressed. “I was infuriated that he was that late,” she recalls. “Fifteen minutes or half an hour, who cares, but to be a whole hour late.” She waited for him at Gladstone’s, a tacky tourist joint on the Pacific Coast Highway. “I just remember I didn’t like him ... I just didn’t like his turn of phrase ... I didn’t like the way he referred to the people. I didn’t like the people he was talk­ing about working with.