Mary Harron quotes:

It never occurred to me to be a film director, partly because I hadn't seen a single film by a female director, but I liked the idea of being a writer moving to Hollywood and being unhappy; that sounded romantic and fabulous to me.

Bettie Page was the first person to do bondage as fashion, because for her it really was all about dressing up.

There's absolutely no point in beating yourself up. Focus on going forward.

I think morale is the hardest part, not comparing yourself to someone else. I think everyone compares themselves to someone more successful than they are. Everyone does it. You have to embrace your own rocky path.

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 grew up interested in the underside of Hollywood, which I think David Lynch does really well.

Mostly I'm just not American. I spent four years of my childhood here, but I think if you're Canadian you have a very different perspective. You don't think you're at the center of things.

The good part of working in TV is it's like being a studio director in old Hollywood and approaching different genres. It's a chance to try out different styles.

Americans always think they have to lead. I'm interested in ambiguity.

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.

Frankly, you're always up and down. You're successful and then you're not.

I had long periods where I couldn't make things happen, and then periods of enormous good luck. I guess the trick is to keep going in the periods when you're not lucky, when your stars are not aligned.

I make unpopular versions of popular things. I make a horror film and it's not a horror film. None of my genre movies function as genre movies.

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.

It's interesting that gay men and young women have been the twin engines of the Bettie [Page] cult.

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.

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.

Growing up, I was lucky that my dad was never out of work. I was very fortunate in one way: that I never experienced real hardship, because my dad is this real dynamo. He was always working, so I had a sense of the ups and downs and endless disappointments, but at the same time I was never worried that we couldn't eat or pay the bills.

I don't think there is any one route to directing.... Other than that I think you just have to think 'By any means possible' and take any job you can that will get you experience. I also did a lot for free. I got paid virtually nothing for my first film, but it changed my 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.

I realized you can always make money; you just do a lot of things.

I really dislike it when women reject feminism; that's ridiculous. I am a product of feminism. Without feminism I would not be making films.

I remember being really interested in the sad parts of Los Angeles, of which there are many, and knowing we weren't up in the citadel on the hill, but we also weren't on the bottom. I was very interested in the poetry of failure as a child.

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.

I think any big success is paralyzing. I have observed it in others.

I was very ambitious at a young age. When I was six, I would tell everybody that I wanted to be an authoress.

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.

I'm bored by films that revolve around a trick. I kind of know if a film is right for me; all the most important decisions are made intuitively.

I'm not trying to make the world a better place.

In my early thirties I was working in television as a researcher. I was really stuck for a period of five years. I got to TV when I was thirty. I hated being a music writer, and kept wondering why I couldn't be doing the exciting things that my friends were doing in television.

Movies are a commitment. They take years of your life and they have big consequences. That's one of the bad things about movies - you're stuck with the aftermath.

My films have elements of genre in them, which prevents them from being purely art films.

One of the secrets of being a great photographic model, as it is for a great film actor, is that you let the camera in. It's an intimacy that the model or actor creates with the lens, that then transmits itself to the viewer.

One thing I'm not is a moralistic filmmaker. I'm not trying to tell people what to do, and I'm not trying to lead.

She [Bettie Page] was a traumatized person, but she did have an active sex life.

Some actors can draw from their own darkness.

The really important people in TV are not the directors; they're the writers.

There was a lot of anger among critics that I had not made a sexy movie.

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.

They say that depression is anger you turn on yourself, and I think women do that.

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.

Punk rock, when I was a part of it, was called 'the underground.' There was something very attractive in all the hidden places, the hidden histories.

I was lucky with my first film because it had Warhol in it. That was the selling point.