Kirill Serebrennikov

Christopher Morris

“If a terrorist organization wanted to knock out the moral compass of Britain, all they’d have to do is to kill 100 celebrities at random. The entire country would have an instant nervous breakdown.”

Gerard Damiano

John Schlesinger

“Hollywood is an extraordinary kind of temporary place.”

Don Hertzfeldt

“Some people can do great things with CG, but that world just doesn’t interest me or inspire me. I’ve never felt really creative or intuitive using software. I like paper and pens and paint. I need to angle real lights on my artwork and work with my hands and build props. Computers just take all that fun out of it.”

Koen Mortier

Jørgen Leth

“That’s the beauty of art, really—that you don’t know where it will take you.”

Georgi Daneliya

“The character on the screen is expressed not through dialogues full of suggestions, not through specially constructed frames, not through the characters’ reasonings about themselves, but through ingenuous action. I analyze people proceeding from their behavior.”

Fernando Meirelles

“We’re supposed to capture what’s in the air and give a form to it. The artist is like an antenna, always searching for new ideas and ways to express them.”

Julian Schnabel

“Some people must go to extremes to get the world in balance for themselves. Some can't bear bright lights, so wherever they go they search for the dark; they turn the lights down, anything to sustain some level of comfort.”

Roman Coppola

Chris Cunningham

“All I ever do is talk about films and then not make them. As a result I thought: just shut up about it—make a film then talk about it when it's done.”

Terrence Malick

“[On Badlands (1973)] I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.”

Arie Posin

Paul Verhoeven

“People love seeing violence and horrible things. The human being is bad and he can't stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness and he'd walk out or fall asleep.”

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.”

Adam Curtis

“I want to try to make people look at things they think they know about in a new way.”

Martin McDonagh

“I can't stand up in front of people. It just fills me with horror.”

Wes Anderson

“I know that feeling of looking back and thinking, that part I'd like to fix. So I obsessively try not to compromise.”

Federico Fellini

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