Ida Lupino

“I'd love to see more women working as directors and producers. Today it's almost impossible to do it unless you are an actress or writer with power...I wouldn't hesitate right this minute to hire a talented woman if the subject matter were right.”

Ross McElwee

“Although I am always questioning whether or not my films are working as they should, although I agonize whether my persona, my voice in the films, seems authentic enough, I still feel very fortunate to have found at least some kind of a voice, and hence a way of seeing the world with my own eyes.”

Michael Ritchie

Lynne Ramsay

“I've found that film-making's not just a job, it becomes part of your whole life.”

Ousmane Sembène

“I am really unable to talk about my life – I don’t know my life. I’ve travelled a lot and this is the life that I have lived, but that doesn’t mean that I know myself.”

Aki Kaurismäki

“Cinema is dead. It died 1962, I think it was in October!”

Alex Cox

“Sorry, but there is no pleasure in finding new ways of saying the same stuff about projects which tanked.”

Albert Brooks

“When I die, if the word ‘thong’ appears in the first or second sentence of my obituary, I’ve screwed up.”

Paul Schrader

“What fascinates me are people who want to be one thing but who behave in a way contradictory to that. Who might say, ‘I want to be happy, but I keep doing things that make me unhappy.”

David Lynch

“I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead.”

Sam Peckinpah

“The end of a picture is always an end of a life.”

John Waters

“Some call me director, producer, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.”

Penelope Spheeris

“I generally think about myself as someone who studies human behavior and is trying to figure out what the hell is going on in our current society. If I can leave any film that helps define a certain time after I'm dead then that's great.”

Takeshi Kitano

“Sword fighting in film is not about how good the fighter is, but how good the actor receiving the blows is.”

John Carpenter

“In France, I'm an auteur; in Germany, a filmmaker; in Britain, a genre film director; and, in the USA, a bum.”

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.”

Preston Sturges

“The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.”

Billy Wilder

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.”

Fritz Lang

“I should say that I was a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears...to my constant regret.”

Jules Dassin

“If there is anything I want to be remembered for, it is for fulfilling Melina's dream [the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece].”