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.”

PES

Jim Henson

“The Muppets transcend all age groups. Their satiric comment on society seems to delight all ages.”

Bill Plympton

“In a perfect world, I would prefer just to draw all day and make these cartoons. But the problem is, if I work for a big studio, then I would lose a lot of my creative ideas.”

Álex de la Iglesia

“There is nothing more funny than when something unexpectedly happens in a funeral, because in a tragic situation it is when one has more desire of laughing: this is the humour, the unexpected thing.”

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.”

Julio Medem

“I want my own experience with each film to be new, so I try to run away fully from the film I made before and make something completely different.”

Francis Ford Coppola

“I'm in a unique situation. I'm like now an elderly retired guy who made a lot of money, and now I can just, instead of playing golf, I can make art films.”

Larry Clark

“Why didn’t they go further? If I’d done that film, I would have done it differently.”

Mike Leigh

“The whole thing about making films in an organic film location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across”

Tim Burton

“I've always loved the idea of fairy tales, but somehow I never managed to completely connect with them. What interests me is taking those classic images and themes and trying to contemporize them a bit. I believe folk tales and fairy tales have some sort of psychological foundation that makes that possible.”

Alfred Hitchcock

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

Zhang Yimou

“To do art, one thing should always remember - subjects of people in misery have deep meanings.”

Fernando Meirelles

“We’re supposed to capture what’s in the air and give a form to it. The artist is like an antenna, always searching for new ideas and ways to express them.”

Wes Anderson

“I know that feeling of looking back and thinking, that part I'd like to fix. So I obsessively try not to compromise.”

Spike Jonze

“Being able to shoot on videos and commercials — just being on the set, with only a certain amount of time and shots and sequences to do in that amount of time, learning how to work with the crew the physical production and the limitations — is all good training.”

Michel Gondry

“Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”

Alexander Payne

“I thank you for this award, though I think there may be a problem with a world in which making small, human and humorous films is ‘an achievement.’ It should be the norm.”

Mike Nichols

“Nerves provide me with energy...It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that I get worried.”

Hal Ashby

“Hitchhiked to Los Angeles when I was 17. Had about 50 or 60 jobs up to the time I was working as a Multilith operator at good old Republic Studios.”