Alan J. Pakula

“One of the happiest times in my life was during "The Sterile Cuckoo," mostly because of Liza. I've never seen anybody get more joy out of working and it's contagious.”

Andy Warhol

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

Alan Clarke

“They're just actors. I much prefer the real thing!”

Glauber Rocha

“Cinema Novo stood with the Brazilian utopia. If it is ugly, irregular, dirty, confusing and chaotic, it is also beautiful, disharmonic, luminous and revolutionary.”

Kenneth Anger

[On unemployed filmmakers] "It seems much easier for these people to rent my films, look at them and make notes, than to give them a job."

František Vláčil

“I never worked as anyone's assistant director nor did I ever study at any film academy, thus the Army Film Division was my 'trade school'.”

Marcelo Piñeyro

Alain Robbe-Grillet

“A new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms.”

Sergei Eisenstein

“Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?”

John Schlesinger

“Hollywood is an extraordinary kind of temporary place.”

Anton Corbijn

“I don't like a very fast film; I wanted a film where there would be time for someone to walk through a room because I like movement by people.”

Miloš Forman

“The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself.”

Věra Chytilová

“I have no desire to cuddle my audience.”

Nicholas Ray

“You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.”

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.”

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...”

Peter Brook

Maya Deren

“The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.”

Jesús Franco

“I feel that cinema should be like a box of surprises, like a magic box. And in that world, anything is allowed to enter, as long as it's always treated with a spirit of 'Pop!'.”

Lina Wertmüller

“I am passionate about liberty. I'm by nature an anarchist, an individualist.”