Overview (1)

Mini Bio (1)

Spouse (1)

Trivia (14)

Moved to England at age 13



Oxford educated



Former occupation as a rock journalist.





First writer to interview Sex Pistols for an American publication.

Helped start the first punk magazine Punk.



Raised in Toronto, Canada.



Did not direct her first film until she was 43 years old.





She originally planned on making a documentary about Valerie Solanas before deciding to make it a feature film.

Member of the 'Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' (AMPAS) since 2016.



Personal Quotes (15)

All women's history is hidden to some degree.



Certainly, I've always been attracted to that. Punk rock, when I was a part of it, was called 'the underground.' There was something very attractive in all the hidden places. The hidden histories.



If I did a big Hollywood movie, I wouldn't be able to control casting.



There's an institutional reluctance - crews are mostly male - but there's also that [personal] reticence.... I went to a film class to talk, and it was half men and half women. But the women didn't talk. So finally, halfway through, I said, 'Why aren't the women talking? Why are only the boys talking?' ... But it's not only hard for women. It's also hard for anybody trying to do stories off the beaten track. I've made three films so far, but I made the films I wanted to make, how I wanted to make them.



Women in the 20th century are astonishing, how much their lives changed. Today, people think who you are is all about internal psychology and what your parents are like. But it's also about your era and where you were born and your class, too, which American films hardly address at all.



I feel that without feminism, I wouldn't be doing this. So I feel very grateful. Without it, God knows what my life would be. I don't make feminist films in the sense that I don't make anything ideological. But I do find that women get my films better.



Sex is a very hard thing to be honest about.





There's a scene in American Psycho (2000) that, to me, was a real dividing line between male and female, the scene where Bateman [ Christian Bale ] has sex with two prostitutes. Because when I read that scene in the book, clearly it was written as a parody of a Penthouse fantasy. As written, the girls are really hot and everybody's really into the sex and having this insane sex experience and, of course, that's a fantasy - you know that they're prostitutes and they're not getting into it. It's a job. So my direction to the actors, to the girls, was that this is routine. This is a job you have to do. It's not like you're really excited about this. I think the portrayal of prostitution in Hollywood movies is always so ludicrous. The girls are always dressed in designer clothes and they're always gorgeous and have perfect skin and they're always really getting into it.

The kinds of films female directors make, which are kind of outside the mainstream, they're not starring huge blockbuster stars. They're probably written in a way that is more off the beaten track. When my scripts go around, definitely I feel like people don't always see the potential in them. So each film is a huge push to get made. I thought that after "American Psycho" it would be easier, but it doesn't seem to get easier with each film. That is the one thing that surprises me, that each time it still seems a battle to get something made.





[on Roman Polanski David Cronenberg and David Lynch ] I don't make films like them, but I admire them very much, and I admire their careers very much, and the way they deal with their nightmares as well. I have been thinking about Polanski a lot because I'm doing The Moth Diaries (2011) and watching Rosemary's Baby (1968), and I am very interested in the way he did the horror of atmosphere-psychological horror. It's not so much what you see but what you don't see -- on directors who have influenced her.

I did some acting in college, and loved it. I think I kind of discouraged myself when I started writing, but I was very interested in journalism, so I left college planning to be a writer. I really wanted to get into film, and at the same time I was getting more into some movies, and I started writing scripts. Then finally I got a job in television and in documentaries, and eventually I started to direct. So I came up first as a journalist then into television, but in England it's not that hard for journalists to go into TV. -- on why she got into directing versus acting or something else



I have a fear of everything going wrong. I like when everything is going right and looks nice ... I never want anything to go wrong. -- on her biggest fear



It's too hard to make a movie you don't care about. It takes years of your life, so you damn well better care about it. And you have to do it as truthfully as you can.



I'm a huge supporter of women, but I realize we can hurt each other deeply. We can do it so well because we have intuition, and we know how to hurt. Men slug it out, which is a lot easier in some ways.



Porn is very clear, you absolutely know where you are with porn. It's a straight sort of, you know, graphic depiction of sex for a purpose. And then you know where you are with entertainment, because it's kind of, you know, escapist and romanticized or takes you into more of a dream world. And then art movies tend to rub your face in things. They tend to more challenge you or disturb you.

