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
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.
Because I'm one of five people in Los Angeles who doesn't drive, I walk a lot.
I've worked on movies where there's all these people coming and going, and I don't even know who they are.
I've been amazed watching people who are not ready with their scripts when they're getting a lot of attention.
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.
Nothing feels worse than knowing that people didn't see your movie. That they wanted to and the critics loved it but nobody knew where it was because it didn't do what it was supposed to do opening weekend. It used to be that independents were allowed to stay in the theaters, build word of mouth.
I think that with the success of, like, VH1's 'Behind The Music' and stuff like that, the fact that it's so successful, it's clear that people are interested in rock lives.
I think when I got drawn to film, I didn't know it was a business. I mean, like most filmmakers, I probably saw more films than a lot of people when I was a kid. But I watched them on TV as well. I was no purist about it. I spent lots of time in movie theaters, but I also watched a lot of films on TV.
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.