Terence Fisher

“Do I believe in the supernatural? Oh yes, certainly. I can’t believe, I can’t accept that you die and that’s the end. Physically maybe it is a fact. But there’s something about the mind that’s more than that.”

John Boorman

“I have sought that lost grace in the film-making process, where the material things of the world – money, buildings, sets, plastic, metal, people – disappear into a camera and become nothing but light and shadow flickering on a wall: matter into spirit, the alchemists would say.”

Stanley Kubrick

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

Whit Stillman

“For me, the present is a golden era that’s ending too. That’s the greatest golden era. Right now. [Laughs.] I just like pining for lost times. I can pine for this morning.”

Albert Brooks

“When I die, if the word ‘thong’ appears in the first or second sentence of my obituary, I’ve screwed up.”

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.”

Don Hertzfeldt

“Some people can do great things with CG, but that world just doesn’t interest me or inspire me. I’ve never felt really creative or intuitive using software. I like paper and pens and paint. I need to angle real lights on my artwork and work with my hands and build props. Computers just take all that fun out of it.”

Tim Burton

“I've always loved the idea of fairy tales, but somehow I never managed to completely connect with them. What interests me is taking those classic images and themes and trying to contemporize them a bit. I believe folk tales and fairy tales have some sort of psychological foundation that makes that possible.”

Christopher Guest

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

Kenneth Lonergan

“A lot of movies nowadays belabor the point, you know the two people love each other, or hate each other. Please let’s get on with it.”

Terence Davies

“Martin Scorsese is a huge name! I'm not a huge name. I go into a room full of people and I'm the only person I've not heard of.”

Ken Russell

“Life is too short to make destructive films about people one doesn’t like. My films are meant to be constructive and illuminating.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ”

Brian De Palma

“So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point. ”

Vincent Gallo

“I constantly try to reinvent my sensibilities and my ideas. I enjoy some of the satisfaction that I get when I feel good about what I've done. But the process is quite lonely and quite painful.”

Lucrecia Martel

“From the very beginning, even when I’m writing, I think a lot about the sound. Many elements of my work in cinema come from oral storytelling and oral tradition. I think about sound and the rhythm of the sound.”

James Gunn

Budd Boetticher

“The Western formula: A man has a job to do, or a couple of men. They try to do it against tremendous odds. They do it.”

Orson Welles

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

Edward Yang

“I was the leader of the Taiwanese new wave. All these guys would just gather in my house, talking and laughing and drinking: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu Nien-jen — just about all of them. You could just push open the door. Everyone just wanted to do similar things. We weren’t allowed to, and no one was willing to give us any money to, but we shared all these idealistic thoughts.”