Lisa Cholodenko quotes:

In June 2002, I had just finished 'Laurel Canyon' and decided to move back to Los Angeles after nearly a decade in New York. Post-9/11 New York felt different.

I had a great love affair in high school and let myself have that love affair and tried to keep it to myself.

The source of so much of my anxiety in life and the tensions in my relationship is my anxiety about my kid. It's all very abstract and unfounded and ungrounded.

I don't feel like my films are about gender; they are about identity - but a different slant on identity.

I have a deal with HBO to develop television, and I am also developing a movie called 'The Abstinence Teacher,' which is based on a book by Tom Perrotta.

Everyone on the planet has a dark and a light. That's a multi-dimensional character.

There's a lot of technology out there to help people have children in different ways, and later in life, for better or worse.

I got exposed to art-house cinema and foreign films. I was from L.A., so it was a film culture that I didn't know about.

Boundaries get blurry and identities can get lost easily. It's easy to take your partner for granted.

This whole Oscar thing is so political. It's about how much a film grosses, and who's in it, and how well it has been promoted.

I had a nutty career. I was living in New York. Then I got to an age where my friends and sister were having children, and I started to think I needed to orient myself towards a world where it could happen.

At the base of it, my gut instinct tells me that there's a kind of fundamental misogyny in the culture. There just is. You know, there's just a weird anxiety around women.

I had pretty cool parents. Still do.

I just think self-satisfied people ignore certain signs about other people.

I was going through some stressful stuff, and I lost feeling in my face and in my tongue. So I went to a doctor. He said he didn't think I had MS or a brain tumor. He said, 'I think you're just stressed out.'

Making the choice to cast someone in a lead role is a big one. You don't want to squander your opportunity.

I don't know if my films are about women in a kind of frolicking - here's a grab bag of women's issues. They are about women of substance with very particular stories.

I think I'm interested in these kinds of character dramas, psychological dramas, domestic dramas, whatever you want to call them - comedy dramas.

There is a core value I wanted to illuminate: No matter what kind of family you have - straight, gay, married, single parent, separated, no kids, two kids, 20 kids, whatever - we all go through the human comedy. But if the bonds are strong enough, and the desire is there, you can get to the other side, still together and still a family.

I get asked why there aren't more female directors all the time. I'm kind of reluctant to talk about it. That's not because I think the question is irrelevant or stupid. It's just that there are so many mitigating factors.

I was a student at SF State, and I honestly didn't know where I was headed. I thought maybe something in the social sciences. But I happened to be living with a group of people, and one person was a film student. I was always keen on and aware of what she was doing.

I think for any artist, your voice is always evolving. For me, the constant is finding a tension or balance between drama and comedy.

I think when you're writing films that just come fresh out of your own imagination - I think probably anyone who's done that, there are certain themes or styles.