Geena Davis Quotes

I think being a woman in Hollywood is a big enough challenge. It really is. I don't want to be one of those people who complain. But the lack of roles out there - it's unbelievable.

Some people come up to be directors by coming through the camera department and there's not a lot of women in the camera department. The ones that are have to kind of prove they're one of the boys, I think. I don't want to get into trouble with generalisations but I think it's a fair observation.

I get asked why there aren't more female directors all the time. I'm kind of reluctant to talk about it. That's not because I think the question is irrelevant or stupid. It's just that there are so many mitigating factors.

I realized that many men are happy to play a supporting role to another man, but they are much less happy to play a supporting role to a woman. People are saying we need more females in our industry and we need more female-driven stories, but that takes the men of bankable star quality to come forward and play supporting roles in those films, because ultimately that's what the women have always done. We've always lent our name value to male-centric stories, and now we're going to have to ask the men to swallow their pride, because it seems that it's about pride.

There are still so few female directors. There are far fewer writers than we'd like to see.

The most frustrating thing is picking up a script and loving the roles in it except the female ones... It's really annoying and something I've striven to change in the industry.

I was also told some years ago that I shouldn't 'waste my time' with female-centric films because the audience was not ready for it.

The [film] business is run by men, and they're basically interested in their own species, and they're not so interested in women belonging to the human race.

I'm not interested in making movies only with female protagonists. I think it's ridiculous to think that a female director can't direct men. That makes no sense to me.

I have always firmly believed that every director should be judged solely by their work, and not by their work based on their gender. Hollywood is supposedly a community of forward thinking and progressive people yet this horrific situation for women directors persists. Gender discrimination stigmatizes our entire industry. Change is essential. Gender neutral hiring is essential.

Every time a journalist will say: "Can women be funny? Can women be pilots? Can women be scientists?" It's less of a question and more of a statement after a while that makes you believe that maybe we can't. I think that's dangerous. I was really happy that I didn't have those barriers, but now I recognize the barriers of many other people.

Why would people have confidence in a female director when there are so few?

My whole theory about why I couldn’t find any creators who realized they were leaving out female characters is because they were raised on the same ratio. I just heard someone the other day call it either ‘smurfing’ a movie, which is when there’s one female character, or ‘minioning’ a movie, which is when there’s no female characters.

I'm still confounded by how few female directors there are. I don't get it.

I want to re-visit everything. We're people and we're so different. I think it would just be nice if it wasn't just like, "Eww, women." That would be a big thing for me.

We have a lot of women on the staff, obviously. It's a predominantly female writing staff and we hire the best people. It's not like we go we need more women or we need four women directing.

The is a lot of anti-sexism coming from my point of view as a woman who deals with it every day. I think sexism is a form of discrimination. It is similar to other forms of discrimination. I think people should feel empowered to not take s**t from anyone.

I'm not a feminist, but I just think it's a really cool process working with a woman as a director.

When I was making films [early in my career] there were very, very few female directors, and there were certainly no women on set, which made taking one's clothes off all the more difficult.

It's harder being a woman director because on the whole women don't have husbands or boyfriends who are willing to be wives

Meryl [Stripe]spoke out about the low percentage of female critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Why are there 760 male critics and just 168 women? You are immediately [biased] on what kind of films you are being told to go see. What are you told are good films? Male films.

I think it is kind of depressing how few female filmmakers there are. I think it is in general depressing how few women there are in ... important positions in society

I hear, more than ever, people actively searching for women to direct, actively wanting to finance women's films, which is not to say it is easy, but I think it's been a great instance of how journalism has put pressure on business to be more fair between genders.

I think the press is doing a wonderful job of putting the pressure on the decision-makers in Hollywood to support more female directors.

I looked at [Geena Davis] research and see things like 21 percent of filmmakers are women, only 31 percent of speaking roles in popular films are female - you start seeing it everywhere. It's so much bigger. So you've uncovered this groundbreaking data and research.