Mark Duplass

“Most people have one independent film in them, because it’s so hard. And then they’re like, “Thank God I made it through. Now I’m gonna go make studio movies.” Then they keep waiting for studio movies to be made. The thing is, I am willing to hang lights and suffer and keep doing it over and over again because I kind of like it. It’s the same thing that makes you want to go camping. You get into it.”

Nicole Holofcener

“To say you want to be a director is to risk sounding obnoxious, pretentious, arrogant, and I think women are more fearful of sounding that way than men are.”

Edgar Wright

“Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget. ”

Craig Zobel

“In any movie you see about a scam artist, there's something sexy and cool about being a scam artist and it just never fully lets you empathize with the person on the other side of it, and I wanted the movie to be about those people. They're the heart and soul of the movie.”

Sidney Lumet

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

Alfonso Cuarón

“The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.”

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.”

Andrew Jarecki

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.”

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...”

Noah Baumbach

“If I had to sell Life Aquatic to a producer, well, I wouldn't say it's like an Éric Rohmer film under water.”

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.”

Spike Lee

“I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.”

Darren Aronofsky

“To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don't think is a good ride.”

Steven Soderbergh

“To me the director's job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.”

Quentin Tarantino

“I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.”

Jacques Audiard

“I’m a long-term student but also a committed autodidact. Therefore I’m as much interested in the ways people learn things for themselves as in the way they do through dialogue and communication. I like to film the way someone moves who is acquiring a new skill or learning something about the world.”

Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”

Rian Johnson

“Dialogue is something I really enjoy; in some ways I feel like I enjoy it too much and that's one thing I've been trying to work on as a writer, not saying everything with dialogue and trying to pull back on it.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”