Frances McDormand

Growing up a preacher's kid wasn't the easiest thing. Everybody's always watching you to see how you'll behave - or misbehave. ”

I want to separate my professional life from my personal life. I want to live a normal life and be a normal mother. ”

My politics are private, but many of my feminist politics cross over into my professional life. ”

Most women's pictures are as boring and as formulaic as men's pictures. In place of a car chase or a battle scene, what you get is an extreme closeup of a woman breaking down. ”

A 90-minute time frame is not long enough to tell a good female story, and that's why long-format television has become so great for female storytelling and for female performers and directors and writers. ”

Cinematic icons of the police detective are more male role models than female. ”

Female characters in literature are full. They're messy: they've got runny noses and burp and belch. Unfortunately, in film, female characters don't often have that kind of richness. ”

Long-format television is a better way to tell a female story. ”

My name is Frances Louise McDormand, formerly known as Cynthia Ann Smith. I was born in Gibson City, Ill., in 1957. I identify as gender-normative, heterosexual, and white-trash American. My parents were not white trash. My birth mother was white trash. ”

It's kind of a subversive act to tell a story of a woman past a certain age, to develop a four-hour movie based on a marriage and a story of two people past middle age. ”