Debra Granik: I think when you practice photography or observation, yo...

There are sayings and mantras that sometimes occur in filmmaking discussions, and one of them is that sometimes filmmaking is an olive branch or a reason or an excuse to be able to reach out and create an encounter with someone.

Debra Granik

olive-branches encounters able

We all have to acknowledge the life and the path we were born into. And the things that define us, they're often somewhat narrow: our class, our race, our gender, where we grew up, what geography we were exposed to. The curiosity and wonderment of, "What it's like on your path?" - that's when you go into high alert.

Debra Granik

curiosity race class

With material wealth and in a culture where many of us defines our self-worth by what we have and what we own and what we achieve, it's very hard to comprehend that there are enclaves all over our big country in which people are very purposefully choosing to maintain different values.

Debra Granik

self-worth country people

My first decade of living in a metropolis was like, I was a people watcher. It meant the world to me to talk to strangers. I got excited about the fifth time I'd see the same person in the same bodega. I loved getting to know a certain clerk or barista. It took on a whole big meaning for me because of that atomization that suburban people do start to feel.

Debra Granik

clerks people world

I grew up in a suburban situation and I was constantly looking for the central, the town. I grew up craving. "Where's the town? Where's the people?" You get into a very isolated shell.

Debra Granik

shells towns people

Sometimes a rural life - without agricultural culture, community, or land - it means that you're a very long drive from everything. It's a big cultural isolation in terms of any kind of schooling where you could get exposed to things that might push the positive buttons. The geography of where people find themselves situated, both in metropolises and in the heartland, really starts to matter.

Debra Granik

land heart mean

I worry an awful lot about people and how they're faring. When I worry about people, whether their job is squashing their spirit, pushing them into a darker pathway of not feeling good about their life, that forces me to look for what's good. What's going well. That stokes a lot of positive feelings. Although I do worry, I look for the hope.

Debra Granik

worry jobs people

Sometimes I wonder about the people who can do very reflective work about their own ethnic group or their own families, or comedies that take place in the life that they've grown up in. That's a very special fortitude. Other brains have a curiosity for what they don't know - the life they're not leading.

Debra Granik

curiosity brain people

There are days when either filmmaking feels like an insurmountable practice - here's a lot of obstacles in the way to make it happen - or you think, "What does this all add up to?" You don't know what to do with the footage, and you've asked a lot of people for their time and a lot of people to be patient with you. And then you lose faith that you can actually make a worthwhile story out of this.

Debra Granik

practice people thinking

I'm always looking for instances of people doing things for and with each other for pleasure, for passion, for camaraderie, from kindness. It's the anthropology of people figuring how to punctuate life with the lyrical.

Debra Granik

passion kindness life people

We need cultural awareness and a cooperative approach with other countries versus a dominating approach.

Debra Granik

cooperative need approach awareness

You gotta call it out first; it always has to be called out when we need social change, but this is how social change happens: you call it out. People had to call out child labor. People had to call out, 'Hey time's up; we need to vote. We live in this country.' People had to call out 'time's up' on enslaving people, you know.

Debra Granik

you change time people

No one has a green light when they start a documentary - not ever.

Debra Granik

documentary start green light

Humour is the be-all and end-all medicine of human existence.

Debra Granik

human humour existence medicine

You can't just pill away injuries that go deep in someone. They don't just stop those feelings from existing.

Debra Granik

deep injuries someone you

I don't want to make fictional characters who are perfect - that's a vanilla situation - but the fact is you are allowed to more carefully select and curate what it is you're going to explore.

Debra Granik

you situation perfect want

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.

Debra Granik

looking look think way

The time that it takes to make the feature is really contingent on the feature being sort of almost ready-made - so coming to a book is more ready-made. You at least have the story that someone sorted out.

Debra Granik

someone you time book

People need meeting places. You need places where ideas get exchanged and you see each other's faces once in a while.

Debra Granik

meeting you people ideas

Some people have these small, positive schemes for survival, a kind of strength that I am attracted to, maybe because I'm prone to the blues.

Debra Granik

i-am strength positive people

I think when you practice photography or observation, you're on high alert. You polish up your antenna and stick up your head, and you're out there. You're receptive, appreciative of details. It heightens reality. You're trying to step into your alertness.