Lasse Hallström

“I was always attracted by the European way of life, but I am deeply Swedish.”

M. Night Shyamalan

“I feel most akin as an artist, in my life and my career, to Agatha Christie. I get where she was coming from, making 80 stories about a point of view. I want at the end of the day to have 50 or 60 stories that came out of my head. Some will hit the mainstream and some won’t, but they’ll all be about human beings, and the analysis of human beings. So she’s my hero.”

Tim Robbins

“Any time you're trying to do a movie with a happy ending, it's very difficult because it's been done before and you don't want to be manipulative.”

Stephen Daldry

“One of the great things about directors is how collegial we feel with each other. We share huge amounts - I get other directors in to see my work all the time and they do the same with me. It's a very warm and generous group of people.”

Oliver Stone

“I consider my films first and foremost to be dramas about individuals in personal struggles and I consider myself to be a dramatist before I am a political filmmaker.”

Carlos Sorin

Francis Ford Coppola

“I'm in a unique situation. I'm like now an elderly retired guy who made a lot of money, and now I can just, instead of playing golf, I can make art films.”

Dario Argento

“Horror is the future. And you cannot be afraid. You must push everything to the absolute limit or else life will be boring. People will be boring. Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can't be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.”

Nagisa Ôshima

“My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it.”

Takeshi Kitano

“Sword fighting in film is not about how good the fighter is, but how good the actor receiving the blows is.”

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. ”

Steven Soderbergh

“To me the director's job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.”

Clint Eastwood

“...in America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience. Not to say that it's all bad, but it leaves a lot of the rest of us out of it. To me cinema can be a much more friendly world if there's a lot of things to choose from.”

François Truffaut

“I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.”

Frank Darabont

“A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.”

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...”

Robert Rodriguez

“Don't give me any money, don't give me any people, but give freedom, and I'll give you a movie that looks gigantic. ”

Héctor Babenco

“I don't really believe that I am a political movie director. My strongest impulse has always been to flee from definitions, flags and ideologies.”

Bernardo Bertolucci

“I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.”

Luc Besson

“Cinema never saved anyone's life, it is not a medicine that will save anyone's life. It is only an aspirin. There are a few directors that I really loved who made like five, six great movies, but are still shooting and they're not good anymore.”