Jon Shenk Quotes

Most people are good people. But they're afraid to speak out, they're afraid for their safety and their jobs. And unfortunately that dictates a lot of their actions.

Let's get to a world where we don't litigate the aftermath, because it doesn't happen in the first place.

The idea of blaming alcohol or drugs or quote-unquote "promiscuity" is a false path. The real issue is that men should not hurt women.

You can't blame a victim for being under the influence when there is a violent act [happening to them]. These are two separate things.

There's something almost impossible about the criminal justice system when it comes to sexual assault cases. It immediately sets up a trial, where witnesses may have been drunk or maybe there were no witnesses and maybe there's no evidence.

We make movies about remarkable people like President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives in "The Island President" and Al Gore in the film, who get up every day and are driven in an almost inhuman way to make a change in a problem that they see in the world and shine truth into a very dark arena where bad actors try to lie to the American public to gain profits for fossil fuel companies. To us, that's a natural drama. And that's primarily where we work - character-based films that we hope will bring issues to life through their stories.

It seems like we're not learning as a community, as a society.

If a girl gets assaulted, it's not because she was drunk. It's because somebody decided to assault her.

A real man isn't somebody who takes advantage of a young girl but who treats her with respect.

What we really are trying to do day to day now is to wake up every day and think about more activist behavior - what we can do to move the needle on the climate crisis, whether it is calling legislators or trying to win the conversation with someone who might not see the issues the way do.

There's a misconception about girls accusing people of sexual assault. There's this sense of, Well, she might be lying, she might be telling the truth, it's really a he-said, she-said. But it turns out if you study the cases, something like 97 percent of the cases are actually true. And you think about it common sense - wise: Why would a young girl or a woman bring this attention upon herself? It's nonsensical. It sets up a binary equation where, in fact, if a girl makes that accusation, she's usually not lying about it.

We see ourselves as filmmakers and as storytellers. We want to make films that move people emotionally. The most effective thing that cinema can do is get into people's hearts and have them see a new perspective on life - step inside someone else's shoes and mind for 90 minutes and experience the world in that way.