There's no need to be tragic or destroy yourself or jump off a cliff. That's no longer the paradigm I wish to follow, or that anyone should follow. It is not necessary to be tragic. It's bullshit that women can't have it all. Why not? Other people do.
I think any big success is paralyzing. I have observed it in others.
I see that women still have self-doubt, and at the same time I feel like I see all these fantastic young women, and they all have ambition and are so focused on their futures. I don't think that's an anomaly anymore.
They say that depression is anger you turn on yourself, and I think women do that.
I wonder if Bettie Page original gay cult had something to do with the ironies inherent in her image, as well as her innate fabulousness as an image.
At any age you can start over. You have to drop the idea of where you should be in your career. And you have to do without a lot of love. Not everyone's going to love you.
If you have had some taste of success, it's extremely addicting. I think the withdrawal from that is what's most devastating. I don't think it's the success that kills people, it's the withdrawal.
Bettie Page was the first person to do bondage as fashion, because for her it really was all about dressing up.
The really important people in TV are not the directors; they're the writers.
She [Bettie Page] was a traumatized person, but she did have an active sex life.
I just don't think I'm an ideological filmmaker in any way. I don't know how anyone could see anything I've done and see that.
Someone can be mentally ill, but if they are young and beautiful and their life is going well, people don't notice because at that point the cracks are almost imperceptible.
I was lucky with my first film because it had Warhol in it. That was the selling point.
There was a lot of anger among critics that I had not made a sexy movie.
People make films about all kinds of relationships, but they won't do these extremely intense platonic love affairs that happen between young girls. In a way they are more intense than anything else you ever have, and that's what I wanted to make a film about, though it was in the context of a horror film.
It's hard when your first thing is something everyone loves. Actually, that never happened to me. I was lucky that my first film, which is actually the best reviewed of all my films, didn't have that success.
When people see the conventions, they think they're going to get the straightforward genre - I don't give them that and they get mad. People see that and they think I don't understand the conventions because I'm not a good filmmaker.
My films have elements of genre in them, which prevents them from being purely art films.
