Geena Davis Quotes

If you risk nothing, then you risk everything.

The whole point of why I'm doing this is to show all kids, boys and girls, that women take up half the space and do half of the interesting things in the world and have half of the dreams and ambitions. Our slogan is, "If they see it, they can be it."

All of Hollywood is run on one assumption: That women will watch stories about men, but men won't watch stories about women. It is a horrible indictment of our society of we assume that one half of our population is just not interested in the other half.

Kids need to see entertainment where females are valued as much as males.

I don't know how in the twenty-first century we can possibly justify not showing girls things that they can aspire to, and at the same time, how can we possibly be showing boys this narrow vision of what women are and what they can be.

I wish I knew who said it, but my favorite quote is, "If a person can do it, I can do it."

I almost never get nervous. I have ice water in my veins.

The more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has in life.

The most important thing is to change what children see from the beginning. To not create a problem we have to fix later.

It's really important for boys to see that girls take up half of the planet - which we do.

I always want a challenge. My whole career has been based on trying to avoid female characters that don't get to do anything. And it's really hard to avoid those.

Instead of trying to manufacture feelings, use the way you already feel. Or at least add that in.

I met the former president of Iceland [Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir] once. I think she was president for, like, 16 years or something. She said she used to get letters from little boys saying, "Madam President, do you think it will ever be possible for a boy to be president?" Just like we assume that girls can't be politicians, they were assuming boys can't. That's what they thought. It's so crazy.

I would say any film can be called feminist that has female characters who have agency in their life, that are in charge of their fate or do important things or take up half the space. I would consider a film feminist, I don't care what it's about, but if the cast was gender balanced, where it would be just as likely that the boss or the best friend or whoever was female. It's really as simple as showing women being in charge of their destiny and giving female characters a voice.

This is really funny, but we did a study of the occupations of female characters on TV, and there are so many female forensic scientists on TV because of all the CSI shows and Bones and whatever. I don't have to lobby anybody to add more female forensic scientists as role models. There's plenty.In real life, the people going into that field now are something like two-thirds women.

An eye-opening moment in my life, a very defining moment, was the first time I met Susan Sarandon [before shooting Thelma & Louise]. We were going to meet, just Ridley [Scott] and Susan and I, to go through the script and see if we had any thoughts or ideas. I was reading the script, and in the most girly way possible, meaning that if it was a line that could change or something different I'd like to see, I would think about each one and say, "Well, this one can wait till the set because I don't want to bring up too many things."

Everything I do, I want to take it to the farthest possible degree. I can't just do something the plain way. I don't cook a bowl of pasta; it has to be puff pastry swans.

I drive [Susan Sarandon] nuts. I'm always talking about her being my hero. I'm sure she's probably sick of it.

I had very, very bad self-esteem - that I was a fake, everybody was going to find out, that I didn't deserve to have success, just about my looks and really, really bad self-esteem.

I told my parents when I was three that I wanted to be in movies. I don't know what I saw at three years old that would make me decide that's a job and I want to have that job. But I was very confident, very sure that's what I wanted to do. I didn't do anything about it. I didn't prove it to myself or anything. I just knew.

I would say how important it is that we stop teaching kids, from the beginning, that boys are more important than girls. It's the 21st century, you know, let's go here. We have to show kids that boys and girls share the sandbox equally and do equally interesting things. We're teaching kids something that we have to try to get rid of later on. Why not just stop filling them with unconscious gender bias?

The film festival is in a town in Arkansas, a quintessentially American town with a little town square. It's to champion women and diversity in all media, so TV, movies, eventually, digital, whatever you get into. That's the goal. We're using the same philosophy as my institute, which is to make it research-based and really try to work directly with filmmakers and content creators and move the needle. It's the only film festival in the world where the prizes are guaranteed distribution.

We need more female directors, we also need men to step up and identify with female characters and stories about women. We don't want to create a ghetto where women have to do movies about women. To assume stories about women need to be told by a woman isn't necessarily true, just as stories about men don't need a male director.

It's partly because our culture so hyper-sexualizes females that if you don't measure up to whatever we're forced to think is the standard, then you feel inadequate.

Women can feel inspired by the story. People who haven't been traditionally given a chance to use their skills or shine are given a chance, and they prevail.