William Klein

“The kinetic quality of New York, the kids, dirt, madness—I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it.”

Harmony Korine

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

Robert Downey Sr.

“When it goes together with film, it's a beautiful thing. When the right music and the right images go together, they make something else, whatever that is.”

Larry Clark

“Why didn’t they go further? If I’d done that film, I would have done it differently.”

Lena Dunham

“It all comes from the writing. Then the desire to direct is the desire to have that kind of control over what I've written and to take my vision all the way to the end point.”

Denis Côté

“Watching art films all your life and avoiding commercial cinema all your life is not a problem. I’m not ashamed of being in the arty crowd and feeding on it.”

Ti West

“The independent world and the studio world are very different. The independent world is about, "Let's get this movie made because it's going to be awesome and we believe in it," and the studio world is about slow business decisions.”

Aki Kaurismäki

“Cinema is dead. It died 1962, I think it was in October!”

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.”

Duncan Jones

“The films that I loved growing up were the science fiction films from the late seventies and early eighties, which were more about the people and how they are affected by the environments that they are in. ”

Denis Villeneuve

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.”

Alex Gibney

“The best movies have to be experienced; they can't just be written about.”

Jean-Pierre Gorin

“You need to reach the point where you are not speaking as an ego, but where something is speaking through you. This is a process of complete dissolution of the ego. Something is speaking through me which is history, not only my own history, but centuries of history.”

Paul Schrader

“What fascinates me are people who want to be one thing but who behave in a way contradictory to that. Who might say, ‘I want to be happy, but I keep doing things that make me unhappy.”

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.”

Groupe Dziga Vertov

Jean-Pierre Melville

“I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.”

Robert Bresson

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Jan Troell

[about working class themes] “When I look back I can see that this is a common theme in my films, but it’s not something I’m actually aware of when I’m choosing. You can see it in retrospect but not when you are doing it."