Michael Winterbottom

“Each scene should feel right, should be true at that moment, and gradually you accumulate these moments of truth until you get enough of them together that it becomes a story that’s interesting.”

Richard Ayoade

Isabel Coixet

“Women blame themselves for everything that is wrong, and men never do that. We have to stop blaming ourselves for what we don’t have and start asking for what we deserve, whether it’s more money or more work or whatever.”

Wim Wenders

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

Mira Nair

“I want to question what the outside is and who defines it. I often find those that are considered to be on the outside, extremely inspiring.”

Stephen Quay

[On their style] "A world as seen through a dirty pane of glass."

Nicolas Winding Refn

“Art is an act of violence.”

Jane Campion

“What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.”

Fatih Akin

“The funnier it is in the beginning of a story, the more dramatic it can become. Because when an audience is laughing, that's opening their souls somehow, and when you have an audience with an open soul, it's much better to hit them with a knife.”

Pedro Almodóvar

“I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.”

Hiroshi Teshigahara

Kenji Mizoguchi

“You must put the odor of the human body into images...describe for me the implacable, the egoistic, the sensual, the cruel...there are nothing but disgusting people in this world.”

Mel Brooks

“I cut my finger. That’s tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That’s comedy.”

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.”

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

“I wanted to make a fake Paris, a Paris of dreams, like in my head when I was twenty and I arrived in Paris for the first time. I wanted to avoid the bad things: traffic jams, dog shit on the street, the rain.”

Catherine Breillat

“When I shoot a film, I always project myself into one of the characters, at once into either a man or a woman...”

Jan Švankmajer

“I never call myself an animated filmmaker because I am interested not in animation techniques or creating a complete illusion, but in bringing life to everyday objects.”

Ang Lee

“Things are being simplified a lot for us lately. I think people are hungry for something that shows more respect for the complexity of life, the depth, the grey areas.”

Louis Malle

“You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.”

Marcel Carné

“I don't know what they'll say when I die. I don't give a damn, but they'll probably cry.”