Geena Davis Quotes

Archers are pretty focused.

Archery is something that I took up later and didn't know I had a natural aptitude for.

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.

All of Hollywood is run on one assumption: That women will watch stories about men, but men won't watch stories about women. It is a horrible indictment of our society of we assume that one half of our population is just not interested in the other half.

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."

I think if you're doing a play, you're rehearsing enough that you get to a point where it's freeing again. But in a movie, if you rehearse too much, now you've just shown everybody what you're going to do. And any element of surprise or impulsiveness is taken away.

I don't know how in the twenty-first century we can possibly justify not showing girls things that they can aspire to, and at the same time, how can we possibly be showing boys this narrow vision of what women are and what they can be.

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 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!'

So many female characters are the girlfriend of the person having the adventure.

I want to play baseball, I don't want to be the girlfriend of the one [who plays].

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

Everything I do, I want to take it to the farthest possible degree.

I can't just do something the plain way. I don't cook a bowl of pasta; it has to be puff pastry swans.

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 wish I knew who said it, but my favorite quote is, "If a person can do it, I can do it."

We have it in our heads that women only need to take up a certain amount of space and then we've done right by them. It's the same in every profession. We get a handful of women professors, a few female board members - that looks normal.

Somebody warned me early on to be very careful about brushing up against the chocolate.

Behind the cameras, there's a different problem, which I think is not unconscious gender bias. It's probably categorized more as conscious gender bias. Because everybody's known the numbers for decades. Nobody's stunned to hear there are very few female directors, only 4 or 7 percent. Everybody knows, but it doesn't change anything. It doesn't make people say, "Wow! We should change that." Nothing happens. It's utterly stagnant.

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 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.

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.

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

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

We need more female directors, we also need men to step up and identify with female characters and stories about women. We don't want to create a ghetto where women have to do movies about women. To assume stories about women need to be told by a woman isn't necessarily true, just as stories about men don't need a male director.

What are we doing that for in the 21st century? Why on earth would we teach kids that girls are less important than boys? It just made no sense to me.

I played this character twice in live action, and now I've become an animated character. It was actually fun to see myself drawn - I've never been a drawn character before.

The ratio of male to female characters in movies has been exactly the same since 1946. So if you've ever had people say, you know, "It's better now, it's all changed, it's all different," it's not, it hasn't. Not yet.

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

I remember very distinctly being so tall I didn't fit sleeves, so I ended up modeling lingerie and bathing suits, sleeveless stuff, basically. I didn't have a good body, but I believed I knew how to stand or pose to mask it.

That's the really frustrating thing, but also the fixable thing.

My theory why no one notices is that that's the [women's roles] ratio thing they grew up with. It's just been that way forever, so they don't see it.

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.

I had this aunt who had a career and traveled.

She'd say things like, "When you go to college, I think we should go scuba diving in the summer. The scuba diving in Portugal is fabulous." And I'd be like, "Portugal! Holy cats!".

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 used to be very unathletic. I was always so gangly and self-conscious about my height. I had convinced myself I was uncoordinated. And as a result, I didn't want to try stuff.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

My knowledge of horror films is pathetic because I can't really watch them.

We all know the huge problem there is with entertainment in general leaving out women. Especially as actors, we know there are fewer great parts for women.

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

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

To not create a problem we have to fix later.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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."