Terrence Malick

“[On Badlands (1973)] I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.”

Harmony Korine

“What I remember myself from films, and what I love about films, is specific scenes and characters.”

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.”

Xavier Dolan

John Huston

“The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on.”

Claude Chabrol

“A woman confronting men is a proper subject, it is inexhaustible.”

Billy Wilder

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

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.”

Howard Hawks

“I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! ”

Roberto Rossellini

“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”

F.W. Murnau

“Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture...we are scientists engaged in the creation of memory... but our memory will neither blur nor fade.”

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.”

Andy Warhol

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

Vittorio De Sica

“I've lost all my money on these films. They are not commercial. But I'm glad to lose it this way. To have for a souvenir of my life pictures like Umberto D. and The Bicycle Thief.”

Fritz Lang

“I should say that I was a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears...to my constant regret.”

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.”

David Lynch

“I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead.”

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.”

Luis Buñuel

“If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'”

Sofia Coppola

“Perhaps it makes sense that a woman whose earliest memory was on the set of Apocalypse Now would grow up to direct a dark fable about five adolescent girls who unapologetically and unceremoniously kill themselves...”