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.”

David Fincher

“I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.”

Wim Wenders

“Any movie that has that spirit and says things can be changed is worth making. ”

Paul Thomas Anderson

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

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.”

Paul Verhoeven

“People love seeing violence and horrible things. The human being is bad and he can't stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness and he'd walk out or fall asleep.”

Kihachi Okamoto

Steven Soderbergh

“To me the director's job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.”

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.”

Masaki Kobayashi

“In any era, I am critical of authoritarian power.”

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.”

Ridley Scott

“People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at. ”

Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”

Terry Gilliam

“You get trapped by stories. Though I've got this reputation for being out of control, it's not true, it just happens to be a more interesting story than the truth.”

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

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.”

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.”

Roman Polanski

“You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.”

Orson Welles

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”