Derek Cianfrance

[On making 'Blue Valentine'] “There was one day where we were shooting on the bus. That's a bit of a movie trope - the encounter on a bus - and yet when we shot that scene, we had a rainbow come out of nowhere. When stuff like that happens, and I know it sounds kind of corny, but you really feel that you are doing the right thing at the right time.”

Phillip Noyce

“A true director is not a director because he necessarily understands the technical aspects of making movies. That can be learned. What can't be learned is a voracious appetite for telling stories. Directors spend most of their lives caught up in telling stories. It's a lifelong passion. Don't wait around. Work on your own stories. It's quite cheap.”

Christopher Guest

“Comedy is like music. You have to know the key and you have to find players with good chops.”

Danny Leiner

Miguel Arteta

“Fear is the enemy of storytelling.”

Park Chan-wook

“The audience seems hazy to me, shrouded in a veil through which I can't see.”

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.”

Jay Duplass

“[W]e’re obsessed with people and we’re obsessed with these weird little passive-aggressive dynamics and little hopeful things that they’re doing.”

Dito Montiel

Clark Gregg

Zach Braff

“The way I write is that I'll actually have a conversation out loud with myself. In a weird way, I just kind of get schizophrenic and play two characters.”

Billy Ray

Gabriele Muccino

Wes Craven

“The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.”

Todd Solondz

“Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can’t celebrate humanity but I’m not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.”

Akiva Schaffer

Frank Oz

“The biggest problems with movies are expectations.”

Todd Phillips

Cary Fukunaga

“Definitely faces are important to me. One of my problems with a lot of things I watch is that everybody’s too pretty and it takes me out of the film because I’m thinking that all these people look like I’ve seen them in a café in Los Angeles.”

Robert Redford

“Ideas aren't real estate, they grow collectively and that knocks out the egotistical loneliness that generally infects art.”