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.”

Miranda July

“As a filmmaker, the last thing you want to do is place kids in emotional or physical jeopardy. Especially for me, coming from a place of really loving those kids.”

Kelly Reichardt

“I like working in a really private way. I mean, we got as far as a cut of [Old Joy] without speaking to any kind of lawyer or anything. We got into Sundance before we thought we should form a company. Aside from a lot of sound work and stuff still to go, it was all very private, and that’s a dream for me.”

Billy Wilder

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

Laurence Olivier

“Living is strife and torment, disappointment and love and sacrifice, golden sunsets and black storms. I said that some time ago, and today I do not think I would add one word.”

Lars von Trier

“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

Woody Allen

“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”

John Cameron Mitchell

“It’s ultimately a boring thing, your sexuality – inherently neutral and kind of dull. It’s what you do with it that’s interesting.”

Louis C.K.

“Every day starts, my eyes open and I reload the program of misery. I open my eyes remember who I am, what I'm like, and I just go "ugh...."”

Dario Argento

“Horror is the future. And you cannot be afraid. You must push everything to the absolute limit or else life will be boring. People will be boring. Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can't be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.”

Lucio Fulci

“Cinema is everything to me. I live and breathe films — I even eat them!”

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.”

David Lynch

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

Sidney Lumet

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

Norman McLaren

“For myself, indeed, with an abstract film, the most pleasing forms are those which come closest to music. There must be visual equivalence.”

Len Lye

“One of my art teachers put me onto trying to find my own art theory. After many morning walks…an idea hit me that seemed like a complete revelation. It was to compose motion, just as musicians compose sound. [The idea] was to lead me far, far away from wanting to excel in…traditional art.”

Alejandro González Iñárritu

“(On why did he not record an audio commentary for 21 Grams) I don't like them. I feel that if you have to explain something it loses strength. It's like a magician trying to explain his magic, in a way.”

Joe Berlinger

Hayao Miyazaki

“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.”

Fyodor Khitruk

“When the wind blows straight to my chest, against me, I have plenty of energy. When the wind blows from my back, that energy disappears. During the period of tight censorship, we struggled with all our might to get our voice heard. But now that everything’s allowed, the strive has vanished. It’s like one French writer once said: an artist must always be a little hungry. Right?”