I'm seeing more and more interesting horror come my way. More and more interesting thrillers and genre films are coming my way from the studio level, and they're financed and they have movie stars attached and all of that. But a lot of times, the storytelling just doesn't speak to me. It feels like it's still oftentimes coming out of a kind of prescribed notion of normalcy, prescribed notion of gender roles. There's not a lot of "new" seeming to be happening.
Karyn KusamaThere's no glory in climbing a mountain if all you want to do is to get to the top. It's experiencing the climb itself - in all its moments of revelation, heartbreak, and fatigue - that has to be the goal.
Karyn KusamaThat complacency and that willingness to give yourself over to a larger power structure is how civilizations destroy themselves. And I just hope people wake up from the slumber they've willed themselves to. Because we're really in a dark place right now.
Karyn KusamaI'm really interested in violence. And I think there's an inevitably cinematic property that violence brings to the moviegoing experience. But one still has to be thoughtful and mature about how you depict it and how you think it through. You have to think about the effects that violence has on audiences, and it's deployed so casually that I think it's losing its meaning. And when things like violence and murder and the dehumanization of other people lose their meaning, then we're really kind of in a place where we have to reexamine and take a hard look at ourselves.
Karyn KusamaI am honored and lucky to be one of the first films funded by Gamechanger Films, a consortium of investors who finance movies directed by women.
Karyn KusamaThere's just so much lazy violence directed at women. But beyond that, lazy violence directed at humans generally. Just lazy violence.
Karyn KusamaTo me, the thing that sets us apart from so many other animal species is our ability to ask questions, investigate, gather information, come to our own conclusions, and sometimes depart from the pack, sometimes move away from the tribe. And I'm not seeing a lot of that right now among a sizable portion of American politics and American voters. I'm not seeing that kind of use of critical thinking, and it really, really freaks me out.
Karyn Kusama