Luis Buñuel

“I distrust reason and culture. In our thoughts there are images that appear suddenly, without us pondering them. In all my films, even the most conventional ones, is the tendency to irrational conduct that can not be explained logically.”

Cate Shortland

“One of the hardest things for me is having to discuss, quote unquote, the state of Australian cinema. I don't want to talk about that, because I'm a film-maker. I don't make films for any reason outside of personal ones. I feel like a fraud if I talk about the industry, because my industry is me and the people I work with and a couple of film-makers. It's not a factory.”

Michael Winterbottom

“Each scene should feel right, should be true at that moment, and gradually you accumulate these moments of truth until you get enough of them together that it becomes a story that’s interesting.”

Alan Ball

“I think it's very difficult and it requires a tremendous amount of spiritual integrity and discipline to not be a narcissist in a culture that encourages it every step of the way.”

Raúl Ruiz

“If you can make it complicated, why make it simple?”

Bruce Robinson

“My whole philosophy of film-making – not that I’ve done it much – is that it’s a conspiracy. Conspire in Latin means ‘to breathe with’, and that’s how I feel about making a film. I want everyone to be making the film, not just me telling them what to do, because these guys are all experts in their field”

François Ozon

“I think cinema has to deal with desire. In the cinema, you are with a big screen, it is dark, and you watch some images, like a fantasy, so I think it is important for you to feel desire for what you see.”

Richard Linklater

“I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists. ”

Robert Redford

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

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.”

Pedro Almodóvar

“I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.”

Bruce Beresford

“Robert Duvall was strange. First of all he was and is a great actor. You could ask him to do a scene five, six times and he'd do it exactly the same way every time. But, on the other hand, there would be delays, like we had to wire up a whole house and he'd just get restless. He'd get mad.”

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...”

Lucile Hadzihalilovic

“What justifies a movie? It’s the reaction it causes in people who see it, professionals or not – the “echo” it finds in certain people. But it is obvious that the critics and the prizes help a little in the visibility of films.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini

“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.”

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.”

Christopher Nolan

“I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today's movies. They believe everything they're hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.”

Roman Coppola

Sofia Coppola

“Perhaps it makes sense that a woman whose earliest memory was on the set of Apocalypse Now would grow up to direct a dark fable about five adolescent girls who unapologetically and unceremoniously kill themselves...”

Michael Mann

“I cannot just make a film and walk away from it. I need that creative intimacy, and quite frankly, the control to execute my visions, on all my projects.”