Anna Boden Quotes

Anna Boden

Profession : Director

Birth : October 20, 1979

As directors, we get very stuck on the stories we want to tell.

Anna Boden

We love telling stories about characters who you root for, even though they sometimes make it really hard for you to root for them and the choices they make.

Anna Boden

I took a class my freshman year in high school called Intro To Film, and I was introduced to Robert Altman's films, and I wrote my first paper on a filmmaker and it was Altman's 'M*A*S*H,' and Nashville and I think 'Short Cuts' or 'The Player,' I don't remember.

Anna Boden

Especially as an independent director, when you're writing something on spec and you're trying to get it sold, you create this entire world in your head and you feel like you know every minutiae of how everything should be.

Anna Boden

I don't think I knew that much about camera placement and working with actors when we did 'Half Nelson.'

Anna Boden

Whenever we've approached a story, it's always started with the character, and the idea of some character struggling with some part of himself. That's what gets us in.

Anna Boden

We have nothing against working with actors.

Anna Boden

We met Ben Mendelsohn, who had acted with Ryan Gosling in 'A Place Beyond the Pines,' and that's the first place where we'd seen him. And we're embarrassed to say that we didn't know that he was a famous Australian actor at the time that we saw it.

Anna Boden

It always worries you when you give somebody the bug to pursue a dream that's really difficult to achieve.

Anna Boden

It would be great to continue shooting on film. Amongst other things, the mystery of not knowing exactly how it's going to look until we see it later and having your DP and being able to trust in him that he's the holder of how this is going to look is a beautiful mystery of filmmaking I'm loathe to look up.

Anna Boden

I think that the world of making movies and how movies get made has certainly changed and evolved over the years. So we're just trying to keep up with it and keep telling our stories in whatever way we can, by hook or by crook.

Anna Boden

I mean, I totally believe in magic and superstition.

Anna Boden

I guess there are women who write from a very woman-centered place, but I don't consider myself to be one of them.

Anna Boden

I'm a very superstitious person. I come from a long line of superstitious people, so it's not going anywhere. For instance, we have this thing on our movies where if one of the key personnel gets a haircut in the middle of the movie, it's bad luck. I swear by that.

Anna Boden

One of the great things about Marvel is that they allow you to take pieces of the character and storylines from the comics and doing your own thing with that.

Anna Boden

I feel like directorial teams aren't quite as uncommon in documentary.

Anna Boden

No, we are not tyrants on set, and we are kind of come at it very much as collaborators and not just with each other but everybody and particularly the actors.

Anna Boden

I speak Spanish, not perfectly; it's definitely my second language.

Anna Boden

When we approach characters, we don't have their full story in mind right off the bat. Through the writing process we raise questions about them, and we start to learn a bit more about them.

Anna Boden

We like to create an atmosphere where people can try whatever they want and experiment. But ultimately people tend to fall on the script and there isn't a ton of improvisation. There certainly are some improvised moments and we encourage that. If it's better than what we wrote it'll be in the movie and if not, it's out.

Anna Boden