Brit Marling
When you come out to L.A. to make movies or to do this kind of work, everybody is coming out on their own and you leave your tribe behind. Then, it's a question of, that was your tribe by blood, and now, what is the tribe that you're making by choice or by what you think is important? I think we were having that experience, so somehow the cult world seemed really compelling.Collection: Thinking
Being a waitress can be a very brutal job sometimes, and I remember during the training, the person said to me, "The redder the lips, the better the tips," and that was like the only advice she gave me.Collection: Jobs
I never want to repeat the same thing. I always want it to be different from what I've done, and to be not quite sure whether or not I can pull it off, until I hopefully do.Collection: Different
Any man worth his salt loves a feminist. Only men who are afraid of the feminine in themselves are afraid of women.Collection: Men
What I like about acting is that you have to be super, super present in the moment. That's not something that comes to me naturally. But if you take the long view on anything, nothing can really affect you or knock you down. It's like, we're here for a blink, we're just the human experiment, one of many experiments going on in the universe, and it's interesting, it's beautiful by fits and starts, but I can't take it that personally. I'm just one of billions of people attempting.Collection: Beautiful
For some reason, I have a very strange conception of time. I am constantly hovering at some overview, more macro.Collection: Hovering
I feel like developing the muscle of my imagination became a way to survive reality.Collection: Reality
I think the first thing I thought when I got out to L.A. was just: Oh, if I want to act, I have to find a different way to go about it because the parts for girls are as dispiriting as the banking jobs. You have to really be willing to invent, I guess, a different path for yourself.Collection: Girl
Life and death and birth is this fantastic mystery that we cannot fully grasp.Collection: Life And Death
Sometimes big budget means explosions! CGI! CGI, the possibilities are so limitless that it begins to be impractical. I'm more interested in the kinds of movies where the science fiction world has a set series of rules and you operate in it because of, maybe, constraints in the budget.Collection: Mean
If you came from the future and you arrived here, what would you be like? Would your immune system be depressed from that travel? Would you be well? Would you be ill? Would you be affected by micro-organisms of the time period and be hiding out in a basement? How would it all work, practically?Collection: Hiding
I feel like, when the audience connects with something, they enjoy the experience so much that they want other people to go have it. They're like, "Don't talk about it. Don't tell. Just go!" It's a nice feeling to have people coming around it that way, protecting the ideas in it, so that everyone can see it for themselves.Collection: Nice
I think you get to see, through the different cult members, why people are attracted to a group like this. Everyone is there for a different reason and from a different background. That was part of what was interesting for us, in researching cults and exploring it. A lot of this happens in California.Collection: Thinking
It seems to be this hot-bed for these ideas and bringing these groups together. You find that the one thing that everybody has in common, whether they're a teenager who has run away from his parents, or a divorcee who lost her husband, is that they all have in common this feeling of searching for a meaning in their lives.Collection: Running
Once you play with these scenes and you're outlining it, again and again, and telling each other the narrative, and telling it to people you know, trying to make sure that the mathematics of the story work, you feel that those are in place, and the actual writing and final draft doesn't take as long.Collection: Writing
Because we're watching so many movies and are consumed by so many stories, science fiction lets you do something a bit fresh and that hasn't been seen before.Collection: Fiction
There are so many filmmakers who are so talented, and actors and writers who work so hard, and it's really hard to let your work enter the world.Collection: Actors
One of my favorite stories growing up was A Wrinkle in Time. I loved that book. I still remember the image, so strongly, of all the kids coming out of their house at the same time, they're all bouncing a ball at the same time, and they all go back in at the same time. A Wrinkle in Time moved me deeply.Collection: Growing Up
One of the things that's awesome about being an actor is that you get to do stories, live lives and have experiences that you never could have even conceived of, and that's because you're living in another writer's imagination and another director's imagination.Collection: Live Life
My brain doesn't work very well, in terms of mathematics. I'm not one of those people who can just spout off numbers for things, if numbers are thrown at me.Collection: Numbers
I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.Collection: Lonely
I used to be able to sit in a chair and for four hours straight in a very focused meditative way be in my own world without ay interruption. And now it's like your brain is getting so trained to check your phone, and there is like a dopamine release every time you get a text whether it's a good or a bad one. I'm really worried about what it's doing to our minds.Collection: Phones
The problem is if you play enough of parts in films that are sort of more financial products than anything or films in which the girl is a thankless, thoughtless, underwritten character along the way, you're no longer the person who had something fresh or vital to offer. I think it really does start to diminish some part of you, to put yourself through things you don't really want to be doing.Collection: Girl
Early rejections are really tough, especially when all of your friends who you went to school with now have legitimate jobs, are getting married, having children, buying real estate, being adults. And you're still trying to figure out how to make a living doing the thing you think you love, but you're not even sure yet because you haven't even done it. It was a long road of risk and treachery.Collection: Children
I think one thing for sure that you learn the more films that you make is how important it is to choose your collaborators.Collection: Thinking
I totally love my job, and I wake up every day basically thinking about how can I do my job better. It never feels like a job. It's hard, and it's exhausting sometimes, but it never feels like - I would do this even if they didn't pay me to do it. That's a pretty amazing feeling.Collection: Jobs
People go to the cinema to be moved; they wanna laugh, they wanna cry, they wanna feel something deeply, especially if they're not feeling deeply in their own lives.Collection: Laughing
I think movies do change people's hearts.Collection: Heart
That's the funny thing about cinema, it is an intellectual medium, but it's also sort of anti-intellectual.Collection: Funny Things
I'd love to do anything that is outside of my comfort zone, that I've never done before. Whenever I think about something that I want to take on, I like it if it makes me a bit nervous, or makes me feel like I don't know exactly that I can pull it off.Collection: Thinking
So much of the world is being brought up on these stories that Hollywood is coming up with and exporting all over. They have so much power and influence, so it's really important that they represent women properly.Collection: Important
The litmus test for whether I want to take on a role or not is usually fear. If Im afraid of it, then I want to do it.Collection: Roles
The more time you invest in something, potentially, the deeper the emotional impact of the climax. It's true of relationships, too.Collection: Emotional
Having spent a lot of time trying to figure out screenwriting, I do feel moved and I want to try to write good roles for women of every age.Collection: Writing
When you're reading Chekov, you're in this world that he's created. I never would have created that world. I don't know anything about that time period or that setting or those groups of people or what those experiences were, but oh my gosh, it's amazing to daydream on it and put yourself there.Collection: Reading
We put limitations on the way that we think about things, on ourselves, think about all the boxes we live in, male or female, you're this age, that age, this is your job, this is not your job, everything is about getting boxed in. I think we accept a lot of those boxes, that labeling, and the way that we perceive the world, but what even is perception? It all seems pretty flexible to me.Collection: Inspirational
The most intoxicating thing about being an actor is to surrender to a story that you never would have come up with.Collection: Stories
It doesn't happen all the time, but in the moments where you really lose yourself and you fall into this character, it's like time travel.Collection: Fall
I think we're in this exciting moment of Internet streaming storytelling, and it's anybody's guess what that is or what it means. It can take on any form. That's what's so exciting about the time we're in; these filmmakers are coming in and letting the story tell itself as it wants to be told.Collection: Mean