Quotes from Anna Boden

It seems crazy moving from making little movies to making like literally movies with Marvel, which are like the biggest movies that they make.

We love telling stories about characters who you root for, even though they sometimes make it really hard for you to root for them and the choices they make.

It's nice to have worked with someone for so long that you're always on the same page.

When we look to cast somebody who hasn't had any acting experience before, it's really essential we find somebody who at some level can just be themselves and who shares a lot in common with the character.

With 'Half Nelson,' we went to Sundance and then we just bam, bam, bam, festival, festival, festival, festival and then we released in August.

We can always connect with all of our characters on a human level, but a lot of them took a lot of observation and exploration and talking with people. And we absolutely embrace our actors' perspectives on all that.

The list of movies that 'Captain Marvel' is a love letter to is very expansive and strange.

We knew a little bit about Carol Danvers, but we certainly hadn't read all the comics and didn't know all her history.

I think always whenever we're casting a movie, it's about sitting down with somebody and feeling in them some kind of the element of who our character is.

I mean, I totally believe in magic and superstition.

I'm one of the most superstitious people I know. There are these two battling parts of me, one is very rational and intellectual, and the other part of me, at my core, I believe in magic in a certain way, and serendipity.

I grew up reading about all those film-makers who were part of a group, like the new wave. It's a little stranger when it's you.

I'm a very superstitious person. I come from a long line of superstitious people, so it's not going anywhere. For instance, we have this thing on our movies where if one of the key personnel gets a haircut in the middle of the movie, it's bad luck. I swear by that.

It's nice to work with the same people. You don't have to be polite. You know each other's likes and dislikes, and you don't have to micromanage and look at what they're doing every moment.

We met Ben Mendelsohn, who had acted with Ryan Gosling in 'A Place Beyond the Pines,' and that's the first place where we'd seen him. And we're embarrassed to say that we didn't know that he was a famous Australian actor at the time that we saw it.

The first time Brie Larson was really on our radar as somebody who we wanted to work with was 'Short Term 12.'

The Gambler' is one of the movies that inspired us. We love that movie.

What gets us excited about any movie is the social relevance and the character themes and the character journeys and like the adventure story.

One of the great things about Marvel is that they allow you to take pieces of the character and storylines from the comics and doing your own thing with that.

I think that the world of making movies and how movies get made has certainly changed and evolved over the years. So we're just trying to keep up with it and keep telling our stories in whatever way we can, by hook or by crook.

It always worries you when you give somebody the bug to pursue a dream that's really difficult to achieve.

We like to create an atmosphere where people can try whatever they want and experiment. But ultimately people tend to fall on the script and there isn't a ton of improvisation. There certainly are some improvised moments and we encourage that. If it's better than what we wrote it'll be in the movie and if not, it's out.

When we approach characters, we don't have their full story in mind right off the bat. Through the writing process we raise questions about them, and we start to learn a bit more about them.

With our movies, you start off getting to know the characters in the way that you meet someone in real life, and then slowly, over time, you get little clues as to who they are. By the end there are still some mysteries, but hopefully you're starting to understand them more.