Kathryn Bigelow

“I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what my aptitude is, and I really think it's to explore and push the medium. It's not about breaking gender roles or genre traditions.”

Michael Powell

“I’m not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through the cinema...”

Jonathan Demme

“I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters. ”

William Wyler

“I made over forty Westerns. I used to lie awake nights trying to think up new ways of getting on and off a horse.”

Rob Reiner

“Everybody talks about wanting to change things and help and fix, but ultimately all you can do is fix yourself. And that's a lot.”

F.W. Murnau

“Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture...we are scientists engaged in the creation of memory... but our memory will neither blur nor fade.”

Todd Field

Frank Capra

“My advice to young filmmakers is this: Don’t follow trends. Start them!”

Peter Jackson

“I don't quite know what an auteur is. I've never quite understood that term, because filmmaking is such a huge team effort.”

Charlie Chaplin

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

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...”

Warren Beatty

“Movies are fun, but they’re not a cure for cancer.”

William Friedkin

“By the time a film of mine makes it into the theaters, I have a love-hate relationship with it. There is always something I could have done to make it better.”

Sidney Lumet

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

Tony Gilroy

David Mamet

“A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue. ”

Paul Greengrass

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. ”

Barry Sonnenfeld

“I really wanted Michael Jackson to be in the first Men in Black, but he didn't want to be considered as an alien!”

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”