Jean Renoir

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.”

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.”

Barbet Schroeder

“Every time, I try to make something different. ”

Götz Spielmann

“There is, behind all the conflicts and painful things I show in my films, a fundamental spark of optimism - the conviction that life isn't a mistake, that it all somehow makes sense.”

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

Terrence Malick

“[On Badlands (1973)] I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.”

Jean Vigo

[on his film, Nizza] “In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial. The last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution.”

Wong Kar-wai

“Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it's the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.”

Rian Johnson

“Dialogue is something I really enjoy; in some ways I feel like I enjoy it too much and that's one thing I've been trying to work on as a writer, not saying everything with dialogue and trying to pull back on it.”

Robert Altman

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Jason Reitman

“I don't want to make films that give you the answer. If there is a message to my films - and I hope there isn't - it's to be open-minded.”

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.”

Terry Zwigoff

“I keep going back to the Forties and Fifties for films, I go back to the Twenties and Thirties for music. For some reason I really like these films from the Forties and Fifties, whether they’re American, French, whatever… I can’t quite put my finger on it, “dark” is the best way I know to describe the quality that I like in them.”

Jonathan Dayton

Christine Jeffs

Gus Van Sant

“I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.”

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.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

George Lucas

“If the boy and girl walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last scene, it adds 10 million to the box office.”

Guillermo del Toro

“I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.”