“There’s no glory in climbing a mountain if all you want to do is to get to the top. It’s experiencing the climb itself – in all its moments of revelation, heartbreak, and fatigue – that has to be the goal.”
― Karyn Kusama
“’The Invitation’ is a meditation on grief and loss carried within a suspense drama. At its core, it’s about a dinner party gone horribly wrong and about the consequences of denying our pain.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I don’t necessarily believe that stories need closure. I just believe they need a beginning, middle, and end, but the end doesn’t have to prevent us from continuing to grapple with the story at hand. It ideally should demand that we remain engaged with the story.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Always keep absorbing art and looking at paintings and reading books and watching movies in other languages, just getting to know the world at hand and the world of the past. It’s important to keep absorbing the world and keep engaging with it, and often that means not thinking about movies and thinking about other things.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I’m a director first and foremost, and I hope that the fact that I’m female is just one of the many things that informs my unique perspective on the world.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Best advice: ‘Just be yourself.’ Worst advice: ‘Just be yourself.’”
― Karyn Kusama
“Horror, almost better than any of the other genres, pits the will to live against the will toward nihilism. I just think that’s worth exploring. I don’t know what is more important, actually, to explore than that very dynamic.”
― Karyn Kusama
“We have to accept that making movies is a never-ending process of occasional progress, frequent setbacks, and unexpected curveballs being thrown our way. Navigating that process requires stamina, curiosity, openness, and creative fire.”
― Karyn Kusama
“It’s extremely instructive to realize that you cannot do everything. You need to delegate, to find experts, to consult with them. A big part of the job of directing is knowing when to take something on and when you shouldn’t.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Our society is constantly creating this framework for girls to feel that their only worth is their appearance, and it’s damaging on so many levels to so many people.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I’ve experienced a lot of successes. I’ve experienced a lot of failures. I’ve been able to get back up on my feet and keep going.”
― Karyn Kusama
“The people in the decision-making positions need to be thinking differently about who to hire, and looking more unsparingly at their choices. Why give this person a break over that person? Why give this person a second chance over that person? I do think that’s where gender comes into play.”
― Karyn Kusama
“One of the uncertain pleasures of adulthood, for me, has really been about confronting how little I know about the world and how much completely baffles me about the world and human behavior.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I’ve been asked countless times, ‘Why are you drawn to horror films? Why do you think women are drawn to horror films?’ And it’s because, in a way, it’s one of the few genres that tells it like it is. A lot of times, women do feel like they’re running for their lives somehow.”
― Karyn Kusama
“A lot of the best suspense operates on a careful withholding of information as opposed to the doling out of information.”
― Karyn Kusama
“It’s pretty gratifying to spend so long to make your first film and then feel like it got a lot of love – that was an incredible feeling. But there’s something very distorting about that much attention. It felt like such a double-edged sword.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I think I was a pretty anxious dreamer, maybe a fundamentally lonely kid.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Day-to-day concerns really trumped big dreams for quite a while in my life. I was so freaked out about money. And until, honestly, I was in my early thirties and made ‘Girlfight,’ that anxiety was a real issue: How are you going to live? How are you going to survive?”
― Karyn Kusama
“I had no shortage of wild times in my youth.”
― Karyn Kusama
“It’s important to tell meaningful stories and to find new ways to communicate those stories to people.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Making movies, even though it’s a business, is also an art, and sometimes you don’t hit the bull’s-eye.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Claire Denis’s ‘Beau Travail’ is one of Denis’s greatest achievements. One of the most mysterious and beautiful endings in movies.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Sometimes you realize that the thing an actor is asking for isn’t exactly the thing they want. Maybe they’re asking for more dialogue, or maybe they want a deep intellectual exploration of their role. But probably what they really need is encouragement.”
― Karyn Kusama
“As bad as some movies can be, good movies are also possible, sometimes through the very heinous corporations we love to trash.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I’m strong-willed, but that doesn’t mean I can’t work with people if we’re all in the mission of trying to make a good movie.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I have had to really grapple with the fact that, while I wish things could be different at times, I ultimately needed to experience the transformation that comes with pain and loss and sorrow.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I think that idea that sort of our emotional self and our emotional life is a faucet that you turn on and off, and that we are in control of it entirely, that’s a really appealing idea for a lot of people. But there are certainly the times where it’s appealing to me, but it never quite works the way I hoped it would.”
― Karyn Kusama
“That’s the most important thing for me is just figuring out how and if I’m growing as an artist.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I guess because there aren’t many women working in the kind of variety of spaces that I’ve had the opportunity and privilege to kind of work in, that there is this extreme scrutiny about my career.”
― Karyn Kusama
“There are times when I’m kind of anti-social, I’m just really shy, and I don’t feel like I fit in, and I then attribute that to some emotional state that’s crippling me.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I understand the power of sorrow, and I understand how far it can take us from ourselves if we let it.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I think most women have to fight very hard for the opportunities they want, which isn’t to say that most artists don’t have to do that, male or female, but I’m definitely aware of just how difficult it is to find stories that interest me, particularly.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I was lucky to work with Gamechanger Films, who are a consortium of investors financing films directed by women. This is a company that puts their money where their mouth is.”
― Karyn Kusama
“For me, there’s something about a certain kind of genre film that has real potency in its emotional landscape.”
― Karyn Kusama
“If you look at most mainstream filmmaking, to be honest, some of these films aren’t even asking questions anymore at all.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I get why we don’t want to be in pain, but there’s something very essential about what happens when we’re in pain and some of the growth that can come from it if we stare at it straight in the face.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I would love to take another stab at really smart, speculative sci-fi – my first was a bit of a stumble. I look forward to getting another chance.”
― Karyn Kusama
“What might the world look like if we took some chances on the film-makers we might be afraid of?”
― Karyn Kusama
“I was in a very lucky position to be able to consider studio films and had decided to not go that route for a very long time until I read a script that I loved called ‘Aeon Flux.’”
― Karyn Kusama
“Genre mechanics are really tricky because if you pay too much attention to the idea of rules of genre, it becomes pretty stale, pretty fast.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Reading the script for ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ I just thought that here was a script that really exposes the horror between girls and friendships. I always sort of approached the film with that in mind first, and then thought about the crazy ways that that horror would express itself.”
― Karyn Kusama
“It is important to know what audiences might expect from their genre movies, but I think it is also important to not give them everything they want. As a viewer, I think it can get pretty boring that way.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I think my narrative is actually pretty interesting if I step back from it and don’t engage too much in it, personally or emotionally.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I don’t think I could have had a better experience than I did with ‘Girlfight.’ It was a humbling experience to be so well received. And it was equally humbling to be ripped to pieces with ‘Aeon Flux.’”
― Karyn Kusama
“I want to make big movies – but I don’t want to have to die a little death every single time I do. Until I meet the people or the studio or the business people who will let me do things a little bit more the way that I need to do them, I probably shouldn’t be making big studio movies.”
― Karyn Kusama
“It’s very difficult to figure out, for me, what stops really talented young female filmmakers from having the kind of careers that their really talented young male counterparts are having.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I grew up in the Midwest. I understand a sense of the small-town mentality, small-town social politics.”
― Karyn Kusama
“There’s something about the girls and the boys who just live for the moment and don’t think a second beyond their needs and the here and now that, ultimately, is pretty tragic.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I think that there’s something about short films that just kind of keeps your muscles sharp.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I don’t get to make many features. It’s not like that’s something I can just snap my fingers and make happen.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I just know I have so much to teach my child. And I just feel kind of like, what would our world be without mothers? What would our world be without mother love? I don’t think we’d have a world.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I am a mother now, and I’m a mother to a son, and I want him to go into the world a feminist. I want him to go into the world with compassion for humanity.”
― Karyn Kusama
“What fascinates me is that when we look at the history of women in politics, so frequently the women who get the farthest are the women who are quite conservative in their political views.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I feel like, generally, the golden eras of cinema seem to be in moments of incredible political turmoil and strife and struggle.”
― Karyn Kusama
“When horror films are made in times of political strife, I think they’re not made with an instinct to add to the chaos but to bring shape to it.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Making ‘The Invitation’ and waiting to make it on my terms and getting final cut and doing it the way I needed to do it was incredibly challenging, but it has really been so great for me. I’m so thankful that that’s happened, that I got to work with actors I really like and have just such a good experience in delving into that story.”
― Karyn Kusama
“To me, sound is a crucial component to, really, any moviegoing experience, but particularly with suspense films or thrillers. I think you need the audience to become subtly really attuned to the soundscape in, like, this uncomfortable way.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I think there are always going to be people who say, even if they are engaged in the movie, they just want it to move faster.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I’m ultimately drawn to film many kinds of stories if they are sort of about unlocking the secrets of our human potential.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I ultimately am probably a pretty anxious person.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I’m just hoping that as I get older, and as more and more movies get made by female directors, what we start to see is how, in the same way good male directors get a shot at creating interesting male and female characters, women do as well.”
― Karyn Kusama
“When I reflect on the losses I’ve experienced, I’ve come to believe that those experiences were transformative, that they shaped who I am.”
― Karyn Kusama
“One thing I don’t do anymore as I’ve gotten older is that I don’t make big blanket statements about whether or not an artist is good or bad.”
― Karyn Kusama
“What kind of world is it if we allow people who are violent and do terrible things off the hook? What does that say about the world we’re living in – it’s like a world upside down, right?”
― Karyn Kusama
“It’s hard to prep a movie in five days and shoot it in five days and cut it in barely any time. You don’t get quite enough time to make the thing, let alone tell the story.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Polanski is a great example of a person whose personal life clearly has been just fraught with scandal and transgression and criminal acts. And yet, in ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ I think he’s made one of the crowning feminist statements in film.”
― Karyn Kusama
“For better and for worse, I feel like sorrow and grief are really transformative personal experiences for me, and I question what I would be had I decided to take a different path and not embrace that kind of pain.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I assumed a business like a film studio would behave like a business and still want to protect its own interests, still do the best it could to get as many people paying for as many of their movies as possible. I realized this is not actually a business about business: it’s a business of egos and dominance.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I don’t want to direct a Marvel movie. I don’t care about those mythologies.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I think there’s a reason why some companies have such dismal records. It’s not because they’re clueless; it’s because they systematically don’t want to hire women.”
― Karyn Kusama
“What I do think is really interesting is that, as I get older and more mature, I’m really attuned to how frightening this world is that we live in.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Sometimes evil is in the form of a malignant clown, and sometimes evil is in the form of policy and legislators, and sometimes it’s a grinning death mask and it has something more viscerally terrifying about it.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I feel a kinship to the idea of beloved stories and beloved pieces of art that we can imagine in different ways and sort of take a meta approach in terms of what those stories offer us.”
― Karyn Kusama
“The nice thing about movies is that you can sort of steer your audience toward seeing that there’s discomfort, but there’s also this sense of, ‘Well, we’ll tolerate this weirdness because maybe it’ll be interesting.’”
― Karyn Kusama
“One of the things you hear about when studying the nature of fanaticism is that a lot of the time, people don’t start as fanatics. They shift and evolve into that state. That’s a process, a systematic process of losing your identity and sense of self.”
― Karyn Kusama
“It’s freeing to be able to consistently make creative decisions and ask creative questions of the team without feeling like, ‘Does this make me vulnerable to getting canned?’ That’s a big part of being in a studio – they can always fire you.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I love horror. It’s funny, because ‘The Invitation’ never struck me as horror, but it’s definitely that type of thriller.”
― Karyn Kusama
“The best horror walks a line that’s completely on a psychological level, not needing the typical tropes of traditional horror filmmaking, then also having to tease out those elements in a way that makes the audience feel like they know what they’re in.”
― Karyn Kusama
“For me, I guess I feel like the notion of ‘feel good’ entertainment… I’m all for it, but I just think you really, really, really have to earn it. I’m not sure I have a lot of movies in me where I see a world that earns it.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I would love to make lighter entertainments that have you sort of hopping and skipping and jumping out of the theater, but part of me just doesn’t know how much I believe in that, as much as I want to.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I’d like to be making more films more frequently, but I do find that making movies, for me, has proven to be an extremely challenging road. No movie is easy; no movie has come together quickly.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I think there is really something we need to examine about the notion of careers, and are women encouraged and given the same opportunities to have vital healthy careers in which they are challenged by certain things, they try new things, they struggle, maybe they stumble, maybe they fail, and then there’s more room to succeed as well.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I’m very interested in dysfunction. I kind of realized in my first film that a character with so much rage that she didn’t know where to put it was both heartbreaking and interesting to me.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I think being a young female star must be really, really pretty rough.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Along with loving the script, the reason I did ‘Aeon Flux’ was because I needed the job, and I couldn’t find $5 million to make a movie independently – after making a fairly successful movie for a million dollars.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I do think there’s a preoccupation that women understandably have with this idea of the roles we’re meant to play and whether or not those roles serve us or ultimately kind of imprison us.”
― Karyn Kusama
“For me, I feel like I don’t see myself as all that different from other humans as a woman, but I’m surprised by how frequently I’m asked to see myself differently.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I think we forget that part of parenthood means having to face and reject or face and embrace a kind of animal capacity for unkindness. And if, when, parents do embrace that, it reveals something very ugly to oneself.”
― Karyn Kusama
“To me, the thing that sets us apart from so many other animal species is our ability to ask questions, investigate, gather information, come to our own conclusions, and sometimes depart from the pack, sometimes move away from the tribe.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Sci-fi and horror, particularly, allow a storyteller to depart from, let’s say, the demands of cinema verite or kitchen-sink realism or, even, just relatable dramas and can go into areas that are either – in the case of horror – more primally effective or, in the case of sci-fi, more speculative or imaginative.”
― Karyn Kusama
“The short form, for those people who can master it – and I am by no means one of them – it is very admirable, because it is really hard to tell stories that can stick with the audience and still be between 5 and 30 minutes long. I think it’s a real challenge.”
― Karyn Kusama
“The genre of horror is really just a way to manage much larger, much more terrifying realities in our daily worlds.”
― Karyn Kusama
“Somehow, even though you have less time and less money, the thing about making indie films is somehow you have another kind of resource: a human resource, where you can really look to your creative colleagues and actually ask questions that are honest.”
― Karyn Kusama
“I think the crux of this urgent and real conversation about representation and diversity in art-making and storytelling both behind and in front of the camera ultimately has to do with simply seeing more human perspectives.”
― Karyn Kusama
“What makes a lot of suspenseful films work is very, very particular points of view and very subjective use of the camera.”
― Karyn Kusama
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