Nia DaCosta Quotes

Nia DaCosta

Profession : Director

Birth : November 8, 1989

I love what Virginia Madsen does, and I love Virginia Madsen.

Nia DaCosta

The first time I experienced anxiety, I was 21. It was my last semester of college, and I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do afterward. I said, 'Mom, I feel like there's a vise over my heart. What's going on?' And she said, 'Oh, it's anxiety.' But I wasn't an anxious child.

Nia DaCosta

Horror, terror, anxiety, I think they're all wrapped in psychological turmoil. It's how we teach each other and our children how to live in the world, what you're going to come across. It's such a fun way to communicate meaning.

Nia DaCosta

All my friends, myself included, went through a Wiccan phase.

Nia DaCosta

Horror has always reflected societal anxiety. Like 'Godzilla' coming out of the aftermath of nuclear war. It tells us what we as a society are afraid of.

Nia DaCosta

What I've had to do because I'm a woman, to protect myself - which tends to be engaging with cues like, 'What's this person thinking?' and how to present myself - I think does influence and help me in certain ways.

Nia DaCosta

Every signal you get is like, 'Motherhood is the barrier to women's success.'

Nia DaCosta

My worst nightmare was, sometimes you go to Sundance and there's a female filmmaker and they're like, 'It's been 12 years since their last film!' I was like, 'Yikes, I don't want that to be me. I also didn't want to get stuck as being seen as someone who just makes small movies.

Nia DaCosta

A lot of my film education when I was younger was basically whatever VHS tapes were in my house, and also the fact that I had premium cable and could watch 'American Beauty' at nine years old, which was super inappropriate.

Nia DaCosta

I like the idea of having historical films about black women who are just having fun.

Nia DaCosta

The work that I create for myself has to be enough to sustain me, creatively. It's tricky because this industry is so much about having an audience and having people support you and give you approval, but you have to learn how to exist without it in whatever shape that takes.

Nia DaCosta

For me, I always want to make movies that have something to say.

Nia DaCosta

I love big superhero movies - when they are good - and I love big worlds and scope and genre, but there should never be a movie that's just mindless entertainment. Even if you pretend it is. It should say something about who we are.

Nia DaCosta

For me, Westerns are about how people are on a frontier, between society and the wild, and what being in that middle ground makes you do to survive.

Nia DaCosta

I just want to tell good stories in ways that will shine light on lives rarely seen on screen, because stories can push humanity forward.

Nia DaCosta

It's through this medium of film that many of us learn about and communicate with one another, especially with people we don't know.

Nia DaCosta

I went through the 1970s in film, and I was so inspired by what I saw and by filmmakers like Scorsese, Lumet, Spielberg and Coppola. They made me think I could do anything I wanted with film.

Nia DaCosta

Even though my family wasn't necessarily super well off, I realized that, because I was in a place with a relatively great infrastructure where I could walk to a hospital, or take the train to a Planned Parenthood or whatever, I was in a much better situation than a lot of women who live in the rural parts of America.

Nia DaCosta

I was always writing and telling stories as a kid. Initially, I was like, 'Maybe I want to be an actor.' Then my mom was the one who was like, 'No, you don't. You want to direct. You want to have more control.'

Nia DaCosta

As I came into myself as a young Black woman, I realized there's a whole type of person and human experience that is just not onscreen. That really pushed me towards what I do now, which is tell stories about people you don't often see stories about.

Nia DaCosta