Mike Figgis

“The filmmakers that I have always admired, Altman, Godard, etc., have all been obsessed with the multi-layering of film. For many years, I have been trying to pack in as many ideas into each film as possible. However, it wasn’t until the digital film revolution that I became aware of the possibility of splitting the screen and doing more complex sound mixes.”

Ken Russell

“Life is too short to make destructive films about people one doesn’t like. My films are meant to be constructive and illuminating.”

Philip Kaufman

“To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.”

John Curran

Carlos Saura

“...my work has a coherence within its incoherence because I've decided to work with elements that I know to the core, to work with characters and settings I've lived with.”

Robert Altman

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Jane Campion

“What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.”

Joel Coen

“The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them. ”

Ethan Coen

“We create monsters and then we can't control them. ”

Danny Boyle

“There's a certain truth that you do end up making the same film again and again so if you vary the genre you have a chance of breaking that cycle.”

Marco Bellocchio

“For me a film grows from an image.”

Elio Petri

“Making a movie today needs a lot of madness and a lot of love for cinema. And most probably this is the only positive side of the whole matter.”

Howard Hawks

“I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! ”

Alfred Hitchcock

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

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.”

Akira Kurosawa

“Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied...that's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.”

Bernardo Bertolucci

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

Errol Morris

“The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

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

David Lynch

“I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead.”