Geena Davis Quotes

If it isn't a success, that still wouldn't be grounds for divorce.

On her film The Long Kiss Goodnight produced by husband Renny Harlin

I drive [Susan Sarandon] nuts. I'm always talking about her being my hero. I'm sure she's probably sick of it.

For a long time, way back in the ’30s and ’40s, there were fabulous female roles. Bette Davis and all those people had incredible, great roles. After World War II, something happened where it was not only "get out of the factories," but "get out of the movies." That's when women's roles started to really [change].

The main thing about archery is a battle with yourself.

You can ruin it all. Once you have learned the technique, the point is to recreate the perfect technique over and over and over.

I love theater. Just, it never spoke to me.

I'm the mother of two daughters, one of whom is going to get possessed.

It's really spooky and great. I'm shooting it right now. That's why I'm in Chicago. I wanted to tell you about the other direction that this trying-to-get-more-female-characters thing has taken, which is that I launched my own film festival last year.

I don't really bust anybody publicly.

It's much more efficient if I can impact the creators. So that's what we do. It's had a great impact.

I just read that 81 percent of Americans are ready to vote for a woman.

So it sounds like America is ready.

I was lucky enough to be in some movies where I had powerful characters or I got to be the president on TV for a little while. Very short administration.

I had told my agents that I never wanted to do an hour-long TV show.

I said, "I'm not that stupid." Because it's the worst lifestyle in Hollywood.

Something's like crossed over in me and I can't go back. I couldn't live.

I was really lucky that I had an aunt who was very inspiring to me.

She was different than anybody in my family on either side.

A woman as the leader of the Free World is an impossibility. Muslim countries won't talk to you.

Even though I was 34 or 35 or something.

I was like, “People can do that? Women can actually just say what they think?” It was an extraordinary experience to do that movie with her because every day was a lesson in how to just be yourself.

The most common occupation for women in G rated films is royalty - which is a great gig, if you can get it.

The whole point of why I'm doing this is to show all kids, boys and girls, that women take up half the space and do half of the interesting things in the world and have half of the dreams and ambitions. Our slogan is, "If they see it, they can be it."

My sons last summer, they won a trophy from their surfing camp and they came home and went right over to the shelf and put it up next to my Oscar. That's where we put our trophies.

Are you stupid or did you just take lessons?

I wanted to take up a sport the real way and see if I actually had athletic ability. And then I happened to see it was during the Atlanta Olympics. And there was a lot of coverage of archery because the U.S. men's team won all the medals. And I thought, "Wow, that's beautiful. And it's so dramatic, a beautiful sport. And I wonder if I would be good at it?"

I have a Web site that parents and girls can use to learn about Title IX and take action if they find their school is not in compliance. Thirty years after Title IX passed, 80 percent of schools are not in compliance.

If you risk nothing, then you risk everything.

Archers are pretty focused.

The most important thing is to change what children see from the beginning.

To not create a problem we have to fix later.

People think of me in the same breath as Robert Redford and Robert De Niro.

My theory of everything is that we are training kids to have gender bias against girls, therefore when you are an adult, you don't see it. We think it's normal.

I told my parents when I was three that I wanted to be in movies.

I don't know what I saw at three years old that would make me decide that's a job and I want to have that job. But I was very confident, very sure that's what I wanted to do. I didn't do anything about it. I didn't prove it to myself or anything. I just knew.

I don't think male characters are as one-dimensional as female characters.

When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.

It's partly because our culture so hyper-sexualizes females that if you don't measure up to whatever we're forced to think is the standard, then you feel inadequate.

I meet Susan [Saradon], and she was amazing.

We sit down to go through the script [Thelma & Louise]. I swear, I think it was page one - she says, "So my first line, I don't think we need that line. Or we could put it on page two. Cut this ..." And I was just like ... My jaw was to the ground.

In advertisements for your favorite products, are women denigrated or objectified in some way? All of that is important. I would rewrite my kids' books, I would write it in the books for the babysitter!

~There are moments when I feel like I have a looong road ahead of me, with college and dating and driving and all of that. But then I realize it just means that I have so much time left to enjoy my kids. And it really does go by so quickly.~

We're showing kids a world that is very scantily populated with women and female characters. They should see female characters taking up half the planet, which we do.

I watched a lot of series. I didn't watch a lot of movies on TV. But I watched Gilligan's Island and Star Trek and all that stuff.

I'm not somebody who takes stuff home with them, that if I shoot a scene and I'm personally impacted for days or something. I mean it certainly is affecting and everything, but it doesn't penetrate to some deeper layer. I'm in it when I'm in it.

Obviously, movies don't almost ever shoot in sequence.

The thing I noticed, have learned the most about directors, is: when they're very confident in themselves, they're open to creativity from other people. If they're scared or nervous, then they shut off and nobody's ideas [count].

Ridiculously - fortunately - my first job was with Dustin Hoffman.

I had a little part in this movie called Tootsie. And he taught me how to watch dailies. That it was very important.

Look at the number of cop shows and lawyer shows and forensics shows.

.. I think there could be room for two quite different examinations of the same political office.

We are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space.

I really only did theater in school in college.

I did summer stock a couple of times in the summer, and plays that the school put on. But I knew I wanted to be in movies.

I have an elbow that bends the wrong way, and I'd do things like stand in an elevator and the doors would close, and I'd pretend that my arm had got caught in it, and then I'd scream, 'Ow, ow, put it back!'

If we show fictional characters doing cool stuff, then girls will want to be it in real life.

The only movies I saw till I was 17 were made by Disney.

My parents had this thing. Disney was like, you know, "Ford is a good car. Disney makes good movies that are good for kids and safe."

There were so many women who had worked throughout the war in every possible job. They were told, "Now leave, so the men can come in" and there was this whole feminizing of women: You have to be very, very retiring and submissive and whatever.

I just passed on some a script that I was sent, because I said, "I haven't yet played the person staying home, the one that says, 'Good luck, honey,' or whatever." And so that's what I look for. Therefore, by virtue of that exclusion, I'm always trying to find roles that are challenging.

Having a very complicated life, or a lot of problems, or a lot of flaws, is always great to play.

The more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has in life.

I had a deliberate plan to get into movies by becoming a model, so I went to New York and got a job pretending to be a mannequin in store windows.

I got cast playing the best baseball player anybody's ever seen.

I don't know how to play any sport, including baseball, but I trained really hard. They had these great coaches, and they started saying, "Wow, you have some like really untapped athletic ability."