Joe Swanberg quotes:

I'm a pretty hands-off director. I let people try things, and if it gets over-jokey, then I'll try and rein it in a little bit.

There's a lot of cultural pressure around specialness and seeing your family. I feel like everything gets jacked up a little bit because of all of these expectations of love and family bonding.

If you're a working mom, you're still expected to be a super-mom at home, buy organic food, put dinner on the table every night, and do all the research into preschools. It's really hard.

There are different levels of scripting that we all use; I think I'm the most improvised of the three, and probably Andrew's the most written. But all of that is in pursuit of similar things, and I think that we kind of recognize that in each other.

I do think there's a smaller audience that's looking for something that's a little more adult and a little more nuanced [than many Hollywood movies]. At the same time, I think everyone who's making movies hopes to appeal to the widest audience possible.

In the pre-production process, I am emailing with the actors or jumping on the phone, and we're sort of figuring out who the characters are and trying to build the relationship dynamic and things like that. Then, also, I am outlining.

It's very difficult to have any kind of romantic feelings for a movie where you know exactly what's going to happen in the first five minutes.

Just because you married doesn't mean you're not an individual person with your own wants and desires and needs.

I do some freelance web design stuff. I taught a directing class for this not-for-profit organization here in Chicago a couple months ago. I wrote a thing for Filmmaker Magazine a couple months ago. Occasionally, I'll get to go speak to students at a university and make a little money that way, which is great. I really like doing that.

I've done a lot of movies that don't have any music in them, and I've always sort of had a kind of wary attitude about music because it can be so manipulative, and also because with pop music, I feel like everybody kind of has their own relationship to songs.

On a really big budget movie you do chemistry reads, and you sort of hedge your bets a little bit more and make sure that these people get along. But on the low budget side of things, I have to trust my gut that when I cast these people, the various elements are going to play together.

I do like the idea of doing something different, maybe doing something that's more like a genre film. And there are certain actors that I'd like to work with that would go along with working with a bigger budget.

It's great to meet people in a setting where it's really conducive to hanging out and having fun. Most film festivals are really low-stress, and good times to hang out with buddies and talk about what you're working on and come up with new ideas.

I'm interested in taking things from my relationship that I don't see on screen - or that I feel like that could be useful or helpful if it were out in the open - and trying to put that in the movies as much as possible.

The really cool thing is all about being able to take your movie around and show it. It puts you in direct contact with people who are like-minded and interested in similar things. I think the film festival circuit has certainly helped to foster the community.

I think in general I personally have a tendency to protect other people's feelings, and I've noticed that becomes a major hindrance to communication. It's better to just be honest, even if it's painful.

Rather than look at a marriage as two people morphing into one thing, you could see two individuals who are choosing to form a partnership.

I want to try and be as involved in the art of filmmaking as possible. I feel that the only way to really do that is to take on as many roles as possible, whether it be as an actor, an editor, a director, a cinematographer.

During improvisations, I'll hear people bringing back up details from something I heard about at breakfast or something somebody was saying that they were thinking about, and it informs a rewriting of a scene.

We're looking for a certain kind of realism or naturalism, and we go about it in different ways, but I think we're all striving for the same end result, which is to capture the patterns of conversations and how people interact in a very realistic way.

My directing is really weird. Everything is based on whether it's working or not. I don't try to fix something if it's not working, I'll just change it.

A lot of the people I'm working with are not actors, or it's their first time in a movie. I'm not trying to shape performances, coax performances out of them. It's more like I want to put them in situations that naturally work or allow them to be themselves. If it's not happening, I'll just completely switch it up, rather than trying to make it work.

I want to communicate with people, and I want to make something that works, and that people like. I'm never purposefully trying to be antagonistic or shocking or anything that would push an audience away. I'm always hoping to reach as many people as I can.

There are people I'm drawn to that you just can't do a tiny, no-budget movie with. I would like to pursue some of that stuff, to see if I could do a movie with some of those people. And I don't really write scripts myself, but if I read a script I thought was really great, I would totally be up for doing a more traditional movie. It's just that I don't exist in that world. right now.

I don't have an agent. I don't take meetings or anything like that, so I don't really know what's out there. I'm not closed off to anything, but I'd just have to ask myself at every step if it's worth it.

[Having bigger budget] allowed me to be a full-time filmmaker for a couple months and not have to have a day job and be balancing a bunch of other stuff. It allowed me to bring in all these people from different parts of the country. It allows me to have an actual food budget, where we could eat healthy for the month we were shooting. It makes all the difference in the world.

The more that I work with people that I don't know, the more I invite somebody in who's potentially going to really hate being there.

I don't want to force somebody to talk about sensitive subjects if they're not into it, but at the very least, even if that's happening off camera, it's allowing everybody to be on the same level, and creates an atmosphere on set that engenders trust.

For a lot of people, you get cramped making decisions together and living together and every other thing that starts to happen. I just think you have to be vigilant in the relationship to carve out space for yourself. And a lot of that requires knowing what you need and communicating that to your partner, which is hard.

It's really easy to finish a movie and sort of immediately dive into the next one, because I love working with actors so much and being on set, my inclination is to try to get back to that as soon as possible. There's just never much of a gap.

I guess I probably see myself as a director. If I had to choose, I think that that's the aspect of the process that I'm most excited by.

I always loved the work. As soon as I finished a movie, the most exciting thing to do was to try to jump into the next one. How I feel about it is that I learned a lot, so I'm grateful that I learned so much, at such a young age, rather than in my more adult professional career.

I'm usually two projects ahead. It's hard for me because I don't have a really long attention span.

There's something really nice about missing the person you're with. To have someone be apart enough to force independence and to also look forward to seeing that person.

I've never been able to develop a movie over several years, and keep coming back to it and adding to it. I get excited by the spark of an idea, and if I can't go make that, there's another idea that comes along that I get excited about. It has to happen quickly, in order for it to happen, at all.

I think I'll try to keep working in film for a little bit. There's something still kind of magical about it, that I don't want to let go of.

In the 10 years that I've been a professional filmmaker, the film part of the film industry is really disappearing, right in front of our eyes.

My relationship with my wife is fraught with all of the problems that any couples face, but there is a sense of humor that we have about it and a real desire to want to make it better.

Am I doing the movie because I'm really excited about it and want to do it, or am I doing it because it seems like it's a big budget or something like that? It would still have to be the right thing, because my lifestyle's really cheap and I'm able to exist doing smaller movies, so if I'm able to do that, I'm happy to do that. But if something bigger came along that seems really cool, then that would be great.