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.”

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.”

Hayao Miyazaki

“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.”

Mikio Naruse

“From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me.”

Kenji Mizoguchi

“You must put the odor of the human body into images...describe for me the implacable, the egoistic, the sensual, the cruel...there are nothing but disgusting people in this world.”

Hou Hsiao-hsien

“The main thing is for the actors to forget the camera. They have to act as if they are working in a documentary.”

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.”

Yasujirô Ozu

“I formulated my own directing style in my own head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others… For me there was no such thing as a teacher. I have relied entirely on my own strength.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful...it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.”

Max Ophüls

“Paris, which had always amused me on holiday, was too lovely… Emigration was no hardship, it was an outing. It offered the shining wet boulevards under the street lights, breakfast in Monmartre with cognac in your glass, coffee and lukewarm brioche, gigolos and prostitutes at night… Everyone in the world has two fatherlands: his own and Paris.”

Fritz Lang

“I should say that I was a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears...to my constant regret.”

Otto Preminger

[Giving direction to a group of children on Exodus (1960)] "Cry, you little monsters!"

Christopher Nolan

“I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today's movies. They believe everything they're hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.”

Billy Wilder

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

Michael Mann

“I cannot just make a film and walk away from it. I need that creative intimacy, and quite frankly, the control to execute my visions, on all my projects.”

Orson Welles

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

Charlie Chaplin

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

Alfonso Cuarón

“The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.”

Andrew Niccol

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...”