Allison Anders
Allison Anders
Allison Andersis an American independent film director whose films include Gas Food Lodging, Mi Vida Loca and Grace of My Heart. Anders has collaborated with fellow UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television graduate Kurt Voss and has also worked as a television director. Anders' films have been shown at the Cannes International Film Festival and at the Sundance Film Festival. She has been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant as well as a Peabody Award...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth16 November 1954
CityAshland, KY
CountryUnited States of America
You end up giving up half your salary every time you make a movie because you need the money to make the movie you have in your head.
You still get the movies made. A filmmaker can always scrape up money to do a movie. The passion drives it. And you'll get the money. Money's the easiest thing. But the hardest thing is finding a way for people to see your movie.
During the '90s, a lot of us in the indie film world were not making our money off our movies. We were screenwriters doing scripts for hire for studios.
My work is better, maybe all filmmakers are better, for Polanski's imprint on cinema. He created language for all of us to use, there is no question about that.
Trauma creates one of four types of people: victims, rescuers, or perps - and if you're really lucky and really strong and very willing and brave, survivors.
When 'Gas Food Lodging' was released, I had already shot 'Mi Vida Loca.'
Unless it's something very clever like 'Memento,' most independent films have a very tough life out there.
When you're traumatized, you pick out one thing you remember more than anything else.
For me, the most exciting thing is that Jane Campion is a woman we can all really look up to. She doesn't have the body of work that some other directors do - no woman director does - but her work is so consistently original, wonderful, masterful.
I don't know that movies are important. But I know that stories are important. Movies may disappear. They've only been around, for God's sake, for the last hundred years... I think that it's the need to tell stories, and that people need to be told stories. It's the old sitting around the fire, you know.
I'd be just as happy being a midwife. That's my ideal job.
While we can work hard at improving our health, size is no more in our control than the color of our skin, our ethnicity, or our sexual preference.
Box office is one of the strongest tools we have toward preserving our ability to make our movies. We really can make a difference by purchasing a ticket each opening weekend to a movie made by a woman, even if you don't like the movie or the filmmaker and even if you don't see the film.
Before, I just don't think we knew how much music was out there; now with MySpace, it's really opened it up. Filmmakers have so much more choice.