Gillian Armstrong

“I think it's actually very tough out there for Australian films. If you think of the Australian film awards, say, 15 years ago, we were voting for... you know, we'd see 24, 25 major feature films that we'd be voting for best picture. I think now it's something more like eight.”

Robert Altman

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Jim Sheridan

“I've seen thousands of films where people are brought down, where it's "life is terrible and we all agree" and the critical audience is over here for that, and the general public is over here. And it seems that cinema has gone out, or life, has gone out a kilter.”

Terry Jones

“Comedy is a dangerous business. If people find something funny you’re okay. But the moment you do something that’s meant to be funny and someone doesn’t find it funny, they become angry. It’s almost as if they resent the fact that you tried to make them laugh and failed.”

Agnieszka Holland

“His penis saved his soul. Otherwise, he might have become a total Nazi.” (on Europa Europa protagonist Solomon Perel, a circumcised Jew who posed as an “Aryan” German during World War II to escape persecution)

Paul McGuigan

Lars von Trier

“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

Andrei Tarkovsky

“Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”

Martin Scorsese

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

Sam Peckinpah

“The end of a picture is always an end of a life.”

John Hughes

“I was obsessed with romance. When I was in high school, I saw Doctor Zhivago every day from the day it opened until the day it left the theater.”

Richard Attenborough

“I do care about style. I do care, but I only care about style that serves the subject.”

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.”

Ray Harryhausen

“People ask me if I would have used computer graphics today. I may have, I don’t know. There’s a lot of technology now that allows you to view instantly the film you’ve just shot. But I never cared what I had done, I only cared where I was going.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ”

Sergio Leone

“In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life in jeeps and upset all my dreams.”

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

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.”

Terry Gilliam

“You get trapped by stories. Though I've got this reputation for being out of control, it's not true, it just happens to be a more interesting story than the truth.”

Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”