Aki Kaurismäki

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

Michael Moore

“White people scare the crap out of me. ”

John Waters

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

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...”

Georg Wilhelm Pabst

“He knows how to create a strange world, whose elements are borrowed from daily life...His characters emerge like his own children, created from fragments of his own heart and mind.”

Francis Ford Coppola

“I'm in a unique situation. I'm like now an elderly retired guy who made a lot of money, and now I can just, instead of playing golf, I can make art films.”

Jacques Tati

“Like a dancer learns to dance ... a visual comic learns to use his legs.”

Jean-Luc Godard

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

David Cronenberg

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”

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.”

Tim Burton

“I've always loved the idea of fairy tales, but somehow I never managed to completely connect with them. What interests me is taking those classic images and themes and trying to contemporize them a bit. I believe folk tales and fairy tales have some sort of psychological foundation that makes that possible.”

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.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

“I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.”

John Ford

“I hate the cinema. But I like making westerns.”

Akira Kurosawa

“Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied...that's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.”

Stanley Kubrick

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

Todd Solondz

“Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can’t celebrate humanity but I’m not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.”

Sydney Pollack

“I don't value a film I've enjoyed making. If it's good, it's damned hard work.”

Kihachi Okamoto

Robert Altman

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”