Steve McQueen

“My influences come from real life. I’m not interested in cinema for cinema’s sake. I’m interested in life—what one does and how one interacts.”

Heitor Dhalia

Naomi Kawase

Cary Fukunaga

“Definitely faces are important to me. One of my problems with a lot of things I watch is that everybody’s too pretty and it takes me out of the film because I’m thinking that all these people look like I’ve seen them in a café in Los Angeles.”

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

Chris Cunningham

“All I ever do is talk about films and then not make them. As a result I thought: just shut up about it—make a film then talk about it when it's done.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini

“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful...it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.”

Luis Buñuel

“If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'”

Gaspar Noé

“A lot of people cry at the end of the movie. Some people come out and smoke a cigarette. Some people go for a walk or a cigarette in the middle of the movie. Each person handles the movie as he wants...”

Matthew Barney

“A lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn't have an ego when it's wanting to throw up. It just does it.”