Lionel Rogosin

“To be a filmmaker you have to have the patience of a monk and the passion of a tiger and be prepared to be paid last.”

Humphrey Jennings

"Humphrey Jennings is the only real poet the British Cinema has yet produced" - Lindsay Anderson

John Cassavetes

“The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.”

Peter Greenaway

“I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.”

Lynne Ramsay

“I've found that film-making's not just a job, it becomes part of your whole life.”

Joachim Trier

“I think, to create reality in film, you still have to go through constructedness; you gotta go through a process of artifice anyways. I'm not one of those people who thinks, "Oh, the real person will seem real on the screen;" to create something that is seemingly real takes a lot of work. But having said that, I try to structure the scenes quite tightly, but then within that, leave them some space to go unexpected places.”

Jonathan Glazer

Krzysztof Kieślowski

“Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”

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.”

Nicholas Ray

“You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.”

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.”

Roy Andersson

“I felt that film-making generally didn't reach the level you could find in painting or literature or music. It was for one-time use only, and more and more, the movies were losing their visual power - they were concentrating on the plot only. That's why I started wanting to be a film director myself. It wasn't only the plot that was interesting; it was the touch, the feeling, something visually rich.”

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.”

Billy Wilder

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.”

Giorgos Lanthimos

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...”

Joanna Hogg

Richard Ayoade

David Lean

“My distinguishing talent is the ability to put people under the microscope, perhaps to go one or two layers farther down than some other directors.”

Bruce Robinson

“My whole philosophy of film-making – not that I’ve done it much – is that it’s a conspiracy. Conspire in Latin means ‘to breathe with’, and that’s how I feel about making a film. I want everyone to be making the film, not just me telling them what to do, because these guys are all experts in their field”