Paul Thomas Anderson

“I'll rebel against powers and principalities, all the time. Always, I will.”

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.”

Pedro Almodóvar

“I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.”

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.”

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...”

Jorge Furtado

Todd Haynes

“I've always felt more politically comfortable making films that demonstrated problems and didn't tell you how to solve them, but made you feel enough for the subjects who were hurt by these problems...”

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

“I wanted to make a fake Paris, a Paris of dreams, like in my head when I was twenty and I arrived in Paris for the first time. I wanted to avoid the bad things: traffic jams, dog shit on the street, the rain.”

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.”

Michel Gondry

“Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”

Gus Van Sant

“I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.”

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.”

Noah Baumbach

“If I had to sell Life Aquatic to a producer, well, I wouldn't say it's like an Éric Rohmer film under water.”

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.”

Spike Jonze

“Being able to shoot on videos and commercials — just being on the set, with only a certain amount of time and shots and sequences to do in that amount of time, learning how to work with the crew the physical production and the limitations — is all good training.”