Mary Harron Quotes
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I grew up interested in the underside of Hollywood, which I think David Lynch does really well.
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It's interesting that gay men and young women have been the twin engines of the Bettie [Page] cult.
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There's absolutely no point in beating yourself up. Focus on going forward.
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Punk rock, when I was a part of it, was called 'the underground.' There was something very attractive in all the hidden places, the hidden histories.
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Growing up, I was lucky that my dad was never out of work. I was very fortunate in one way: that I never experienced real hardship, because my dad is this real dynamo. He was always working, so I had a sense of the ups and downs and endless disappointments, but at the same time I was never worried that we couldn't eat or pay the bills.
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I was lucky with my first film because it had Warhol in it. That was the selling point.
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I was very ambitious at a young age. When I was six, I would tell everybody that I wanted to be an authoress.
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When people see the conventions, they think they're going to get the straightforward genre - I don't give them that and they get mad. People see that and they think I don't understand the conventions because I'm not a good filmmaker.
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I'm not trying to make the world a better place.
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I think any big success is paralyzing. I have observed it in others.
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One thing I'm not is a moralistic filmmaker. I'm not trying to tell people what to do, and I'm not trying to lead.
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I remember being really interested in the sad parts of Los Angeles, of which there are many, and knowing we weren't up in the citadel on the hill, but we also weren't on the bottom. I was very interested in the poetry of failure as a child.
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Americans always think they have to lead. I'm interested in ambiguity.
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One of the secrets of being a great photographic model, as it is for a great film actor, is that you let the camera in. It's an intimacy that the model or actor creates with the lens, that then transmits itself to the viewer.
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It's hard when your first thing is something everyone loves. Actually, that never happened to me. I was lucky that my first film, which is actually the best reviewed of all my films, didn't have that success.
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Some actors can draw from their own darkness.
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Frankly, you're always up and down. You're successful and then you're not.
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It never occurred to me to be a film director, partly because I hadn't seen a single film by a female director, but I liked the idea of being a writer moving to Hollywood and being unhappy; that sounded romantic and fabulous to me.
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I had long periods where I couldn't make things happen, and then periods of enormous good luck. I guess the trick is to keep going in the periods when you're not lucky, when your stars are not aligned.
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I make unpopular versions of popular things. I make a horror film and it's not a horror film. None of my genre movies function as genre movies.
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I don't think there is any one route to directing.... Other than that I think you just have to think 'By any means possible' and take any job you can that will get you experience. I also did a lot for free. I got paid virtually nothing for my first film, but it changed my life.
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I realized you can always make money; you just do a lot of things.
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I'm bored by films that revolve around a trick. I kind of know if a film is right for me; all the most important decisions are made intuitively.
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My films have elements of genre in them, which prevents them from being purely art films.
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At any age you can start over. You have to drop the idea of where you should be in your career. And you have to do without a lot of love. Not everyone's going to love you.
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There was a lot of anger among critics that I had not made a sexy movie.
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Movies are a commitment. They take years of your life and they have big consequences. That's one of the bad things about movies - you're stuck with the aftermath.
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She [Bettie Page] was a traumatized person, but she did have an active sex life.
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In my early thirties I was working in television as a researcher. I was really stuck for a period of five years. I got to TV when I was thirty. I hated being a music writer, and kept wondering why I couldn't be doing the exciting things that my friends were doing in television.
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Someone can be mentally ill, but if they are young and beautiful and their life is going well, people don't notice because at that point the cracks are almost imperceptible.
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