Pietro Germi

Pedro Almodóvar

“I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.”

Nicholas Ray

“You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.”

Jacques Demy

"He has an idea of the world he is trying to apply to the cinema or else… an idea of cinema which he applies to the world." —Jean-Luc Godard

Luchino Visconti

“I took a round trip around Hollywood because I think it frightened me. I didn’t want to get burned in that glare.”

Otto Preminger

[Giving direction to a group of children on Exodus (1960)] "Cry, you little monsters!"

Orson Welles

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

Charlie Chaplin

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

John Huston

“The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”

Ernst Lubitsch

“There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.”

Howard Hawks

“I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! ”

William Wyler

“I made over forty Westerns. I used to lie awake nights trying to think up new ways of getting on and off a horse.”

George Cukor

“I don't weep or anything, but there's always some part of me left bloody on the scene I've just directed.”

Federico Fellini

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

Woody Allen

“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

“I'll rebel against powers and principalities, all the time. Always, I will.”

Alfred Hitchcock

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

Hayao Miyazaki

“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.”

Roberto Rossellini

“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”