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.”

Frank Capra

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

Otto Preminger

[Giving direction to a group of children on Exodus (1960)] "Cry, you little monsters!"

Éric Rohmer

“I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak.”

Ernst Lubitsch

“There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.”

Shane Carruth

“It was a huge risk. I quit my job that paid fine. I could have had a family and probably survived as a software engineer pretty well. But I quit all that to do this.”

Atom Egoyan

“I think with all directors there are ideas that recur, at least for the ones that have creative control of their films.”

Hiroshi Teshigahara

Billy Wilder

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.”

Michael Haneke

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

Jean-Pierre Dardenne

“The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.”

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”

Stan Brakhage

“There are a lot of movies made for nobody.”

Ermanno Olmi

“...our wars of machines and technology make 'progress' ever more impersonal and deadly - a 'progress' that has not guaranteed man's human, moral, and civil growth.”

Preston Sturges

“The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.”

Martin Ritt

“I don’t have a lot of respect for talent. Talent is genetic. It’s what you do with it that counts.”

Robert Bresson

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

Howard Hawks

“I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! ”

John Huston

“The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on.”

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”