Jesús Franco

“I feel that cinema should be like a box of surprises, like a magic box. And in that world, anything is allowed to enter, as long as it's always treated with a spirit of 'Pop!'.”

Ruggero Deodato

“When I made Cannibal Holocaust, I put a lot of work into the film, and then it went to sleep for 30 years.”

Jack Hill

“I liked the Warner Bros. movies of the forties. That’s my main influence. The noirs and the gangster films.”

Gaspar Noé

“A lot of people cry at the end of the movie. Some people come out and smoke a cigarette. Some people go for a walk or a cigarette in the middle of the movie. Each person handles the movie as he wants...”

Ken Russell

“Life is too short to make destructive films about people one doesn’t like. My films are meant to be constructive and illuminating.”

Jean-Luc Godard

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

Ralph Bakshi

“Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.”

Jean Rollin

“The fantastic cinema is always a good vehicle for discussing certain political ideas in the form of symbols and metaphors.”

George A. Romero

“If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.”

Lars von Trier

“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

Dennis Hopper

“Like all artists I want to cheat death a little and contribute something to the next generation.”

Nobuhiko Obayashi

Wim Wenders

“Any movie that has that spirit and says things can be changed is worth making. ”

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.”

Stuart Gordon

[On H. P. Lovecraft] That's the thing, he used his phobias. Fear of things that are different or unknown is sort of a central theme to a lot of his stories.

Tod Browning

“The thing you have to be most careful of in a mystery story, is not to let it verge on the comic. If a thing gets too gruesome and too horrible, it gets beyond the limits of the average imagination and the audience laughs. It may sound incongruous, but mystery must be made plausible.”

Lloyd Kaufman

“The thing I find about the movie industry is that 99 percent of the people are absolute scum. But the other 1 percent are really the greatest, most wonderful people in the world.”

Wes Craven

“The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.”

Tobe Hooper

“No matter where you’re going it’s the wrong place.”

Umberto Lenzi

“For me the characters were more important than the murders.”