David Lean

“My distinguishing talent is the ability to put people under the microscope, perhaps to go one or two layers farther down than some other directors.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

Jean-Luc Godard

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

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.”

Bernardo Bertolucci

“I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.”

Federico Fellini

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

Hiroshi Teshigahara

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.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

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

Alfred Hitchcock

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

Ridley Scott

“People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at. ”

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.”

Stanley Kubrick

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

Martin Scorsese

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