Charlie Chaplin

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

Buster Keaton

“I don't act anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.”

Michael Moore

“White people scare the crap out of me. ”

Barry Levinson

“It gets harder and harder to make movies about human beings. These movies are like an endangered species.”

Trey Parker

“Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they're the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.”

Rob Reiner

“Everybody talks about wanting to change things and help and fix, but ultimately all you can do is fix yourself. And that's a lot.”

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...”

Robert Rodriguez

“Don't give me any money, don't give me any people, but give freedom, and I'll give you a movie that looks gigantic. ”

David Fincher

“I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.”

Peter Greenaway

“I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.”

Alfred Hitchcock

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

Steven Soderbergh

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

Kenneth Branagh

“I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.”

Neil LaBute

Neil Jordan

“My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end. ”

Mike Nichols

“Nerves provide me with energy...It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that I get worried.”

Miloš Forman

“The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself.”

Doug Liman

“The movie I end up with is the movie I aspired to make.”

Wes Anderson

“I know that feeling of looking back and thinking, that part I'd like to fix. So I obsessively try not to compromise.”

Tim Robbins

“Any time you're trying to do a movie with a happy ending, it's very difficult because it's been done before and you don't want to be manipulative.”