Debra Granik

We just started filming 'Stray Dog' really close to the finishing of 'Winter's Bone,' down in Southern Missouri.

Film is a team thing. There is no auteur.

My ego is one thing. Of course I want people to like what I do. Of course. There's no doubt. You wouldn't do it. But I think what people don't fully know is how responsible you feel for so many entities. So many hardworking people who've collaborated.

I'm someone who's always looking for hope - if there's a ray of hope, a shrapnel, shred, a flake of hope - because I take the misfortune or hard times of others very seriously.

I think, in some ways, that is the balm of stories, of fables, of tales: it's the way we're wired. We have always needed to distill what we're going through and try to understand it by looking either backwards or forwards. And the hardest is to look in the now.

It's funny: your happiness is contingent on a bigger picture besides just yourself.

I would fail if I had to work with stars. And I also can't afford to work that way. I can't afford to have special circumstances for rarified individuals. So, I work with actors who have given me a sign that they're willing to work in these more humble circumstances, in real-life locations.

What does it really mean to have something change in you very late in your life, after you've structured your life in a different way? What does it mean to be someone who has had a history of sometimes reckless living, and then to really want to change yourself?

Social realism takes research.

A big part of the equation for 'Winter's Bone' was making it for so little that we owe nobody. We had a guaranteed loan and were able to pay it back.

Make your film for the least amount you can.

It's kind of a test when you read a novel thinking about its potential for the screen: How does it play on your mind's screen?

I think one thing that's always a concern to me is you see a role, and you're not seeing the character; you're seeing so-and-so do it. Then I'm taken out of the story considerably, personally.

History has shown that there needs to be some agora, or public spaces, and I think that we already live a lot of our life on a laptop, or even smaller devices that we hold in our hands.

Our necks are getting injured from looking down, and the movie screen gives you opportunity to look up, you know? It gives you an opportunity to possibly have a discussion with someone afterwards.

You can't make movies without known names, and unknowns can't become known, because they can't get work.

I come from what they call the land of nowhere. I'm from the suburb. It's extremely atomizing.

It's been a pleasure to see female comedians be prominent and flourish - like Kate McKinnon's Rudy Giuliani impressions, which are uncanny in their precision.

In Hollywood, only a female who's massively damaged is interesting.

Sometimes I struggle with being American.