When I make a documentary I shoot very little but I hang around with my camera for a long time. I look at the people for a long time through the loop and then when I see something interested then I shoot. I think that I have become very sensitive to these things.

I like to get something that is impossible to verbally order. Sometimes it's something the person is not even conscious of, and it's something you could never ask of them specifically. It's just there.

Being a female director become as professional as your male colleagues and forget the whole question about being female. You are female anyway and it is going to work in your favor. The scope of female professional superiority can be understood by so few men that mostly they do not miss it.

There is one thing where people are always right. It is when they are describing what they have been feeling when watching your film. You cannot say: No, you did not feel like that!

If you take a big epic novel and you shoot it, when you get to the editing room you notice that it has 2 million climaxes, which fill the whole 90 or 100 minutes. Then you realize you can't cut them out because if somebody is dying and you cut that out it seems like they just disappear from the film.

If you fill your time as a director talking about lights and technique with the crew then it's frightening for the actors to be left alone. Somebody has to keep them safe from the mess that is the machinery.

I had worked in fiction a lot before I started making documentaries, but when I was around 32 or 33-years-old I suddenly got so fed up with the world of fiction, which is so money-centered.