Vincent Gallo

“I constantly try to reinvent my sensibilities and my ideas. I enjoy some of the satisfaction that I get when I feel good about what I've done. But the process is quite lonely and quite painful.”

Michael Haneke

“Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer?”

Georges Méliès

“We sat with our mouths open, without speaking, filled with amazement.”

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

Alexander Payne

“I thank you for this award, though I think there may be a problem with a world in which making small, human and humorous films is ‘an achievement.’ It should be the norm.”

Richard Linklater

“I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists. ”

Steven Soderbergh

“To me the director's job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.”

Cary Fukunaga

“Definitely faces are important to me. One of my problems with a lot of things I watch is that everybody’s too pretty and it takes me out of the film because I’m thinking that all these people look like I’ve seen them in a café in Los Angeles.”

Harmony Korine

“What I remember myself from films, and what I love about films, is specific scenes and characters.”

Xavier Dolan

Guy Maddin

“Whatever I do next, it'll be a horror film.”

Spike Jonze

“Being able to shoot on videos and commercials — just being on the set, with only a certain amount of time and shots and sequences to do in that amount of time, learning how to work with the crew the physical production and the limitations — is all good training.”

Gus Van Sant

“I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.”

Miranda July

“As a filmmaker, the last thing you want to do is place kids in emotional or physical jeopardy. Especially for me, coming from a place of really loving those kids.”

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

Robert Bresson

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Federico Fellini

“What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one...”

Jean-Luc Godard

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ”

Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”

Sofia Coppola

“Perhaps it makes sense that a woman whose earliest memory was on the set of Apocalypse Now would grow up to direct a dark fable about five adolescent girls who unapologetically and unceremoniously kill themselves...”