Danny Boyle

“There's a certain truth that you do end up making the same film again and again so if you vary the genre you have a chance of breaking that cycle.”

Alex Proyas

“I like science fiction as a genre, and to me, I like basing my films in the real world in terms of being scientifically plausible.”

Bobcat Goldthwait

“That movie looks so bad, I can’t believe I wasn’t in it.”

Joss Whedon

“If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.”

Paul Verhoeven

“People love seeing violence and horrible things. The human being is bad and he can't stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness and he'd walk out or fall asleep.”

Henry Selick

“There’s invention every day. Every day it’s like a feast. It’s very grueling, it’s very demanding. Puppets seem like vampires sometimes. They live, and you’re depleted.”

Sidney Lumet

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

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.”

James Foley

Michael Haneke

“Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer?”

Jim Henson

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

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. ”

Ousmane Sembène

“I am really unable to talk about my life – I don’t know my life. I’ve travelled a lot and this is the life that I have lived, but that doesn’t mean that I know myself.”

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.”

David O. Russell

“I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.”

D.A. Pennebaker

“You don’t necessarily need a script or actors to tell a compelling tale. Finding a person at a key moment in his life and rendering the truth as you see it—that’s the truest form of drama.”

Joe Dante

[About producing movie trailers for Roger Corman] "We did all kinds of things in trailers to help sell films. We had a famous exploding helicopter shot from one of those Filipino productions that we'd cut in every time a trailer was too dull because that was always exciting."

David Fincher

“I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.”

Frank Darabont

“A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.”

Jonathan Levine