Michelangelo Antonioni

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

Jean-Jacques Beineix

“[on releasing the director's cut of Betty Blue] Very simple: More sex, more violence, and more money for me.”

Sidney Lumet

“All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.”

Julien Temple

“I'm just trying to find another way of doing it. Treat each time as though you know nothing about the form.”

Roland Joffé

“I think it's a very dangerous thing for anyone to decide if there was a point when one was good, or that one may be good now. Each movie is a chance to do something different and interesting. That's what I mean by not having a career. I've not tried to be a 'something'. I've just tried to live. ”

Alan Parker

“Making a film is so hard that if you don't have your main actors going along with the ride with the rest of the crew it can make your life very difficult.”

Oliver Stone

“I consider my films first and foremost to be dramas about individuals in personal struggles and I consider myself to be a dramatist before I am a political filmmaker.”

Joe Dante

[About producing movie trailers for Roger Corman] "We did all kinds of things in trailers to help sell films. We had a famous exploding helicopter shot from one of those Filipino productions that we'd cut in every time a trailer was too dull because that was always exciting."

Danny Boyle

“There's a certain truth that you do end up making the same film again and again so if you vary the genre you have a chance of breaking that cycle.”

John Boorman

“I have sought that lost grace in the film-making process, where the material things of the world – money, buildings, sets, plastic, metal, people – disappear into a camera and become nothing but light and shadow flickering on a wall: matter into spirit, the alchemists would say.”

William Friedkin

“By the time a film of mine makes it into the theaters, I have a love-hate relationship with it. There is always something I could have done to make it better.”

George Roy Hill

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.”

Philip Kaufman

“To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.”

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.”

Stanley Kubrick

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

Jean-Pierre Melville

“I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.”

John Carpenter

“In France, I'm an auteur; in Germany, a filmmaker; in Britain, a genre film director; and, in the USA, a bum.”

Ethan Coen

“We create monsters and then we can't control them. ”

Joel Coen

“The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them. ”