Janelle Monáe
My parents never told me, “No, you can’t entertain, you can’t sing, you can’t act.” They just encouraged me by listening to me, by allowing me to listen to R&B, to gospel, to pop, by watching movies. They took me to go see films. They took me to go see Black films. They took me to see sci-fi films. It was there early. I think just opening up my mind early on to what I could do.
Janelle Monáe
Greta Gerwig
Directing is vulnerable, of course. But it’s funny. In the moment you have a machine in front of you, so you can feel kind of safe in the machine of it. And acting, you suddenly feel like you’ve opened your chest, and all of a sudden, your heart is just beating out for everyone. And that’s a quite uniquely terrifying experience that I hadn’t had for a while. And then I did it again. And I thought, Oh, right. This is hard. This is very hard. This is what I’m asking people to do all the time.
Greta Gerwig
Guillermo del Toro and Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz)
I truly, truly felt as a kid that monsters were the incarnation of the permission to be imperfect. The permission to not be the active, sporty, happy, sunny boy that everybody seemed to consider an ideal, that it was okay to be in the darkness, or reading a book and being quiet.
Guillermo del Toro
Rian Johnson
You should have faith that if you keep putting yourself out there in some way, shape, or form, you’ll wind up where you should be.
Rian Johnson
Kate Hudson
I think some people, after working in our industry for a long time, can feel exhausted by the process, and kind of beaten down by the amount of criticism. It’s hard, especially for women. It’s why I think you see so many women stepping away after a while; they just need a break. You know, with the great comes the bad. I don’t know how I’ve figured out how to cut all that noise out. But I think I’ll always want to just be a part of this little weird, wild, creative world called moviemaking. I love it so much.
Kate Hudson
Florence Pugh
It feels really wonderful to be in charge of my career, in charge of what it is that I want to say and what it is that I have opinions over. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do that. I didn’t think that there was going to be space or room for that. As much as everything else is changing, amazingly it hasn’t affected anything. I still have the same core values and I still love my family too much. And I think that what makes it fun is bringing them along on the journey as well. It makes it so fun to share it; otherwise, it would be so lonely.
Florence Pugh
Millie Bobby Brown
Young women are dragged down for many different things. If it’s their maturity, if it’s the way they dress, if it’s the things they say, if it’s the songs they sing, the way they act, the choices they make, we will never be enough. It’s for us to find camaraderie in that and sisterhood in that, and stand together and say, “We are enough.
Millie Bobby Brown
Chelsea and Hillary Clinton
I remember the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater with my grandmother and my younger brother. I was maybe six and he was three, and it was a reissuing of The Wizard of Oz. I thought it was miraculous. We had a little black-and-white TV at that time — I had no idea how that worked. I really did think there were little people in there. And [I remember] going to a theater and just being overwhelmed. To me, it was entertainment, but it was so much more than entertainment. It was such a spark of imagination and a great story and [there have been] so many instances over so many years now where I felt that.
Hillary Clinton
Eddie Redmayne
I love my job. I never take that for granted. I loved acting at school. I can’t believe that I get to do it for a job.
Eddie Redmayne
Mila Kunis
We started talking about the war in Ukraine. And my seven-year-old at the time was like, “There’s a war where you’re from?” And I was like, “Oh, yeah. There’s this war.” And we tried to explain it in a kid-friendly way. She found identity in that conversation and she decided she was going to be super proud to be from this country that was fighting for its freedom.
Mila Kunis
Tyler Perry
I look at my life as never having any failures, because everything that I thought was a failure worked for my good. As awfully as it may have been in the time, looking back at it now, it taught me such a valuable lesson to prepare me for exactly where I am now.
Tyler Perry
