I will always face the conundrum that the subjects I'm attracted to aren't essentially commercial.

There's a lot of journalism about poverty, but sometimes it just helps to see that there's a real person who becomes a real mom, who is working with unsustainable wages that could eventually destroy her.

I would fail if I had to work with stars. And I also can't afford to work that way. I can't afford to have special circumstances for rarified individuals. So, I work with actors who have given me a sign that they're willing to work in these more humble circumstances, in real-life locations.

It's funny: your happiness is contingent on a bigger picture besides just yourself.

I think, in some ways, that is the balm of stories, of fables, of tales: it's the way we're wired. We have always needed to distill what we're going through and try to understand it by looking either backwards or forwards. And the hardest is to look in the now.

I'm someone who's always looking for hope - if there's a ray of hope, a shrapnel, shred, a flake of hope - because I take the misfortune or hard times of others very seriously.

Film is a team thing. There is no auteur.

We just started filming 'Stray Dog' really close to the finishing of 'Winter's Bone,' down in Southern Missouri.

I feel like reality TV has thrown a difficult wrench in the system - on the programming and making side, and on the curating side - which is that we now have a higher threshold for the salacious. We have a higher threshold, unprecedented, for fast, cheap, and out of control.

There are documentaries that will just save your life and be the conduit to the art form you started out loving.

I always think that my assignment is to seek out stories that are experienced by people who don't get the ticket for Easy Street.

The struggle to have a living wage doesn't come easy. You're ready to work, you want it, you seek it... but it's not like it's just given to you.

The time that it takes to make the feature is really contingent on the feature being sort of almost ready-made - so coming to a book is more ready-made. You at least have the story that someone sorted out.

The questions that loom can be intimidating. 'What kind of moves is she gonna make? What is she gonna do?' There is this pressure that you're supposed to keep impressing.

What I would love is for people to see some of the stories I want to tell.

I feel as though perhaps there's not a great match between the content I'm attracted to and the content that is considered attractive to some of the more major or more traditionally financed entities.

A role is never just a ready-made thing.

It's almost like Time's Up allowed some really good old-school players to stand up and say, 'We're actually just really normal companies that want to facilitate culture-making. Some of us are even in it for the slow returns.'

I'm a trudger.

I bring forward stories from the lives of everyday Americans: those whose path hasn't been set out on easy street or who haven't been given it all, those who are actually forging ahead because of their own personal resources, their moxie, their survival instincts.

The challenge for me is to make sure I've done my work. To make sure not every scene is quiet, that other scenes rise up, that there's different tension.

I get very caught up in the day-to-day and immersed in the scenes as they unfold. It's harder for me, as I'm filming, to see the larger story.

I'm interested in the lives of Americans for whom the ways this culture has tried to define itself - that is, self-esteem defined by material wealth - they have nothing to do with that.

The social-media discourse is very different from what it might be on the ground. It's easy to bloviate without having to look anyone in the eye and then having those sentiments swell and amplify and go viral.

It can't change anything immediately, but films can absolutely be catalysts for conversation.

I'm looking for a living wage and to continue my work. The frustration comes from when I can't do the things that matter most to me. It's when someone comes and says, 'I will finance your movie if you cast so and so.'

I'm doing my best to stay off that financing scheme that relies on this one strip of capital, which is the red carpet. And - no sob story - but it's hard. It takes a while.

You will never go wrong with actually photographing process. It's primitive. Humans love to see the bipedal animal in us finish things. We just like it!

I'm always searching to learn more about our large and diverse country.

There are so many American experiences that we can't know about unless we venture out to create a dialogue, to observe, ask questions, and stay there for a while.

I swing with a lot of torque from non-fiction to fiction, and I really like that place in between.

Action films don't speak to me, because that's not my skill set. I also have a lot of stipulations about stories I don't want to perpetuate, ones that bring me down or make me feel like life's not worth living.

There has to be a continuation of the communal experience of filmgoing.

I need and want to see capable women. I don't like to see them weep all the time.

All filmmakers want the option to make another film, to have it not always be such an uphill battle - for it to be our life, our working life.

When I read Daniel Woodrell's novel 'Winter's Bone,' I was drawn to the characters, the setting, and the sound of the dialog.

My first narrative films developed out of a documentary process - finding someone who was willing to be filmed, watching, listening, taking copious notes and many hours of video footage.

My first camera job was filming workplace safety videos, which involved months of watching and videotaping people doing their jobs. I was hooked - from there, I wanted to know where they lived and the rest of their habits and desires.

I'd love to do a comedy - something where a character has to use humor to navigate the absurdities of life.

You have so much more time to observe and learn with a documentary because of the time between the shoots. You get a much deeper understanding of day-to-day life and its themes. It's also much more of a mess after three years; you have to comb it out carefully and see what fits together and makes sense.

The protagonist in 'Winter's Bone' was a really good role for a female. She was strong; she didn't have to conform to something or be a sidekick to any man. That's part of what you're responding to; it's a woman-centric situation. Her value in the film was not reliant on any man.

There is a porous membrane between a documentary that doesn't use interviews and what you would call a neorealist hybrid film.

The immigration process is so unbelievably complicated and expensive and endless!

When men's lives become extremely hard, women learn how to deal with them and assist them but also develop quiet systems of coping and managing.

Humour is the be-all and end-all medicine of human existence.

Humour is used in struggle and solving difficult things, and I relish that tradition.

In the U.K., working-class lives are depicted with the characters' humour, but in the U.S., people with difficulties are often depicted with pious or simply dreary lives.

There's all these costs of war, and they're huge and long-lasting. It's not just the numbers CNN broadcasts. And we never want to pay the VA bill; we never want to pay the bill to take care of these warriors after we applaud their sacrifice.

I don't want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, 'Hey people, hey people!'

'Winter's Bone' really suited having a lower budget. It would be so hard rolling into a rural setting, a place where people are poor, and to be thinking you've got $10 million to make a piece of entertainment.