Wong Kar-wai

“Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it's the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.”

David Cronenberg

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”

Nicolas Roeg

“You make the movie through the cinematography - it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.”

Douglas Sirk

“If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.”

Harry Smith

Koji Yamamura

Damon Packard

“My thoughts on copyright infringement are mixed and complicated. Everything is a rip-off of everything else now anyway, so why even bother with any restrictions?”

Chris Marker

“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”

Tony Richardson

“It’s no exaggeration to say that the ‘sequence’ group changed the whole way of feeling and thinking about film in England – at any rate for a few inspiring years, before the British sank once again into complacency and philistinism.”

Mike Leigh

“The whole thing about making films in an organic film location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across”

Kenneth Anger

[On unemployed filmmakers] "It seems much easier for these people to rent my films, look at them and make notes, than to give them a job."

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.”

Stan Brakhage

“There are a lot of movies made for nobody.”

Joseph Cornell

“Shadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime.”

Maya Deren

“The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.”

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

John Waters

“Some call me director, producer, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.”

Jim Henson

“The Muppets transcend all age groups. Their satiric comment on society seems to delight all ages.”

Terry Gilliam

“You get trapped by stories. Though I've got this reputation for being out of control, it's not true, it just happens to be a more interesting story than the truth.”

Todd Haynes

“I've always felt more politically comfortable making films that demonstrated problems and didn't tell you how to solve them, but made you feel enough for the subjects who were hurt by these problems...”