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.”

Michael Powell

“I’m not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through the cinema...”

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.”

Takashi Miike

“I don't think about the audience, I don't think about what makes them happy, because there's no way for me to know. They think of the audience as a mass, but in fact every person in the audience is different. So entertainment for everyone doesn't exist.”

Tetsuya Nakashima

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.”

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.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

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

Wong Kar-wai

“Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it's the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.”

Quentin Tarantino

“I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.”

Kim Ji-woon

“I don’t know yet which genre I’m best at so I have to try lots of different ones! I don’t want to repeat a genre that I’ve already done because working with a variety of styles inspires me and gives me more cinematic energy.”

Kim Ki-duk

“I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.”

Michel Gondry

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

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.”

Bong Joon-ho

“Human beings basically express their feelings in the same way. They feel the same feelings. If you look at two foreigners talking to each other, you soon can see if they are fighting, or are in love.”