Susanna Fogel

I hope that women know that they can and should try everything they're interested in - with the confidence that men have had.

Economics drive the creative, and for a long time, movies about men were just considered 'movies,' whereas movies about women were considered niche and only appealing to women. This is to an extent still true, and what it does is represent movies about women as less profitable.

The process of working with the second unit director and basically sharing your workload with another director is such an interesting, delicate thing - and entrusting that person with your vision and making sure that you are not adding a completely different aesthetic to the mix that you don't have to contend with in editing.

Friendships have been such an important part of my life both emotionally and logistically.

I started really idolizing people like Nicole Holofcener and Whit Stillman.

Anything that feels like good characters, I am excited to do whether I write it or not. But if I don't find it in the world, I will write it myself.

I love action movies, and I love comedy, and I love writing comedy, but the genre of action-comedy - or, at least, as it currently usually is - is just not something that I feel that compelled by, generally, because I find the action to be silly, or it's too slapstick, or the stakes feel low because people are joking in the middle of it.

When you're watching a Bond movie, if there's a violent death, there's something about cleverly chosen twists, or what props are used, or some way that he's doing something that feels like an ironic twist, that feels like it gives the audience permission to enjoy watching it and to enjoy watching something that's otherwise just brutality.

Micro humor is a joke that's contained in the writing: it's a punch line, it's a turn of phrase, it's something that you can see on the page, and no matter who's saying it, it is, in and of itself, a funny line.

Macro humor is just a person being themselves in a situation, saying whatever they're going to say, and it's funny because of the situation and who they are, or they say something, and it's just so them.

Our friendships are really the epicenter of our social world and emotional lives.

You can have a lot of destruction, but in a realistic female movie, the women are going to be aware of that destruction and apologizing for it.

Any place where the Jewish district is the hipster district is a very surreal and awesome place.

It's become my lifetime passion as a writer to try to show female friendships in the way that I see them, which is as emotional and connected and deep.

We're so used to seeing women in movies about a romance where they don't seem to have any inner fortitude. They're completely defined by their relationships, and it's hard to engage with those characters and relate to them.

I think it's good that we're talking about it, but I think there's still a gendered nature to the way that people see female directors' skill sets. And I think we need to keep examining that. I don't know if people know how complicated the issue really is.

The older I got, the less pretentious I got in my art tastes and work.

In Providence, we didn't have a first-run movie theater. But we did have an indie movie theatre on the Brown campus. That was the theater we'd go to. I think, as highbrow as it sounds, that I grew up on the films.

When I was in high school, I was writing a lot. I dealt with my high school angst by writing short plays and short films. I was obsessed with reading 'Entertainment Weekly' and 'Premiere' and 'Movieline' and all those magazines.

I try to write from a place of writing what I know, and what I know is interesting and appropriate women with edgy senses of humor. They're not soft people, so why are all the movies about women soft? My friends are all blazing their own paths. Some are married with kids, but a lot of them aren't. Some of them don't want that life.

I still feel, when I meet actresses, no matter how high-profile they are, that they are starved for good roles.

I'm a writer-director originally from Rhode Island, now living in Los Angeles. I've spent the past eleven years working with a writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and am now making the transition into feature directing thanks to this script we wrote together and our incredible producer Jordana Mollick.

I studied English in college and approached filmmaking from a writing background while trying to learn as much as I could about the technical side of things by making shorts and a webseries.

I love Nicole Holofcener's films for their constant duality of humor and emotion and their focus on very real, if flawed, dynamics between funny people.

I was a heathen Jewess with no bat mitzvah. Only the neurosis, the brown hair, and the self-deprecating humor. But being one of the only Jewish kids in my WASPy hometown definitely informed my perspective on the humor of being an outsider.