Kevin Macdonald

“I always wanted to be a journalist. But I couldn’t even get a job as a trainee reporter. So I taught English for a while, traveled, and drifted into making documentaries.”

Francis Veber

“I don't live in America, I live in Hollywood.”

Patrice Leconte

“You may think it’s very presumptuous, but I really hope that my movies are going to turn people into better people.”

Mark Duplass

“Most people have one independent film in them, because it’s so hard. And then they’re like, “Thank God I made it through. Now I’m gonna go make studio movies.” Then they keep waiting for studio movies to be made. The thing is, I am willing to hang lights and suffer and keep doing it over and over again because I kind of like it. It’s the same thing that makes you want to go camping. You get into it.”

Jay Duplass

“[W]e’re obsessed with people and we’re obsessed with these weird little passive-aggressive dynamics and little hopeful things that they’re doing.”

Nicolas Winding Refn

“Art is an act of violence.”

Alan Clarke

“They're just actors. I much prefer the real thing!”

John Carpenter

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

Terry Zwigoff

“I keep going back to the Forties and Fifties for films, I go back to the Twenties and Thirties for music. For some reason I really like these films from the Forties and Fifties, whether they’re American, French, whatever… I can’t quite put my finger on it, “dark” is the best way I know to describe the quality that I like in them.”

Billy Wilder

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

Kelly Reichardt

“I like working in a really private way. I mean, we got as far as a cut of [Old Joy] without speaking to any kind of lawyer or anything. We got into Sundance before we thought we should form a company. Aside from a lot of sound work and stuff still to go, it was all very private, and that’s a dream for me.”

Christopher Smith

“Film is bigger than everyone and I think that every single experience you have in one film prepares you in some way for the next. But cinema is always growing and changing shape.”

Xavier Dolan

Richard Lester

“Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.”

Zack Snyder

“In the zombie movie world, that's how you affirm your friendship. When someone really loves you, they blow your head off.”

Satoshi Kon

“It's true that the attitude of directors towards how to employ CG differs from person to person. In fact I don't think that type of blending has become a natural part of our everyday lives. Our wish is for analog animation to swallow digital animation.”

Ramin Bahrani

“Film is really 24 frames a second in the present, and I realize when you leave certain gaps, it allows space for the viewer to enter the film.”

Neil Marshall

[on making Centurion] "Very hard in so many respects… trying to do a film of this kind of ambition and scale on what is essentially a pretty small budget by Hollywood standards. We really had to make every penny count."

Brad Bird

“We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.”

Lee Unkrich

“People here know that this is a special place, ... especially the people who have worked at other studios. There is no other place like this on the planet. There's this tangible energy in the air. They know they're working with people who are at the top of their game and who value creativity and storytelling above all else.”