40 Quotes by Joe Swanberg

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.