Jessica Chastain Quotes

There aren't enough good roles for strong women. I wish we had more female writers. Most of the female characters you see in films today are the 'poor heartbroken girl.'

It's not something someone sets out to do - I never really set out to make movies about strong fighting women, but it just seems to happen that way. I've certainly known some, and I think my sister was probably a big influence.

I'm glad that cinema is catching up to what television has known for a while: That three-dimensional, complex women get an audience engaged as much as the men.

I like women in film. I like women in general, but I especially like to show them on film. They are not ciphers.

I've made movies that are real boy movies - but I've had so much fun over the years working with women and getting good performances with women and with strong female characters.

I am like many of the women I have played onscreen.

I won't take parts where the female character has no substance.

I think women have such rich emotional lives that they are expressive about. I also think they're funny. I like watching strong female characters, and I like writing them. I don't know if it's conscious that I gravitate towards women, but it's certainly evolved that way.

Every time there's a really good story, there's women in it. We may not get as many roles, but the roles we get are really good, I think, for the most part.

I think that there are a lot of male writers and directors in Hollywood, and a lot of the female characters you do see are really one-dimensional, but I think that's changing more and more as there are more women taking control in Hollywood.

Slowly but surely, we have much better female roles to play and to choose from.

One of the things that we've tried to do with the 'Guardians' films is to allow the women to be full characters.

There are so many female roles - particularly for young women - that are just somebody's girlfriend or somebody's daughter, or that are accessories to the main story rather than being three-dimensional characters.

I'm drawn to female characters; not all of them are strong characters.

Women are never the protagonists; we're always reactionary against everything that's done to us. I like people who write for women that have got a bit more about them.

Get more women producers, writers, directors. Why should we expect men to do it for us? They can't.

I'm always really comfortable writing strong, smart ladies. That's kind of my bailiwick.

Sometimes I take a movie selfishly because it's a female lead.

You know, Mamet is not a huge writer of female parts. Most of his movies don't even have women in them, so I'm lucky I'm in it at all.

I think for women especially, writing and creating your own role, producing, directing - having some control over what you do is really important. We can pave the way for other women to send what messages they want sent.

I'm so sick of hearing how there's no strong roles for women. I don't care about strong roles. I just want to see women who are characters! A nun, a serial killer, a housewife, as long as there's some depth there.

People sort of accuse Tolkien of not being good with female characters, and I think that Eowyn actually proves that to be wrong to some degree. Eowyn is actually a strong female character, and she's a surprisingly modern character, considering who Tolkien actually was sort of a stuffy English professor in the 1930s and '40s.

I want to keep playing strong female roles. I don't mean superheroes, but women who are really alive.

James Patterson has a way with female characters. He understands women in a way that a lot of male writers don't.

I think that's important to women in comedy, that we get a lot of the good lines and you're not just the girlfriend or the sister.