Nicolas Winding Refn

“Art is an act of violence.”

Tomas Alfredson

“The soundscape is fifty percent of the experience. Any kid can nowadays easily point out where and how you’ve made certain visual effects, but very rarely what they’ve experienced with their ears. This is still an enormous orchestra to conduct, which is in the dark for the audience.”

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.”

Darren Aronofsky

“To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don't think is a good ride.”

Jean Cocteau

“Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail. ”

Debra Granik

Chris Marker

“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”

Peter Bogdanovich

“It's a misconception about acting that it's a practice in pretending to be someone else. It's actually a practice in finding the character within yourself.”

Edgar Wright

“Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget. ”

Pier Paolo Pasolini

“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.”

Brian De Palma

“So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point. ”

Jean-Pierre Melville

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

Guillermo del Toro

“I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.”

Gregg Araki

“I couldn’t make movies like this if I started to worry about what Jerry Falwell is going to have to say about it.”

Ethan Coen

“We create monsters and then we can't control them. ”

Alejandro González Iñárritu

“(On why did he not record an audio commentary for 21 Grams) I don't like them. I feel that if you have to explain something it loses strength. It's like a magician trying to explain his magic, in a way.”

Stephen Frears

“When you’re starting, what you chiefly have is energy and passion and that will go a long way to cover a certain amount of funkiness in how you tell a story. But you’re never going to make a film late in your career the way you made it at the beginning and to try to is insane.”

John Waters

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

Zhang Yimou

“To do art, one thing should always remember - subjects of people in misery have deep meanings.”

Fatih Akin

“The funnier it is in the beginning of a story, the more dramatic it can become. Because when an audience is laughing, that's opening their souls somehow, and when you have an audience with an open soul, it's much better to hit them with a knife.”