King Vidor

“My luck was my father not striking oil... we'd have been rich. I'd never have set out for Hollywood with my camera, and I'd have had a lot less interesting life.”

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

“In my films the landscapes connect the characters to a sense of something cosmic. I try to recapture those moments in life where you suddenly feel that connection to a wider universe.”

Georg Wilhelm Pabst

“He knows how to create a strange world, whose elements are borrowed from daily life...His characters emerge like his own children, created from fragments of his own heart and mind.”

Julia Leigh

Amos Gitai

“Israel’s one-man New Wave” —Michael Atkinson

Jean Renoir

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.”

Josef von Sternberg

“I care nothing about the story, only how it is photographed and presented.”

Raoul Walsh

“There is probably no moment in picturemaking that is more acutely essential to a director’s success than the instant of his choice of story material. For the director, that is the moment of conception.”

Rouben Mamoulian

“Color, like all power, can be harmful and destructive when used badly, life-giving and creative when used well. Animals and human beings have been and are unconsciously subject to a strange hypnotic influence of color. How many times have you walked into a strange house and felt depressed because of the color of the wall-paper! How many times have you found consolation in the rich riot of shades of a gorgeous sunset?”

Victor Sjöström

“The thing that brought me into filmmaking was a youthful desire for adventure and a curiosity to try this new medium.”

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.”

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.”

Dariush Mehrjui

“The greatest privilege we have as human beings is the ability to say no.”

Kenneth Branagh

“I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.”

Kim Jee-woon

“I don’t know yet which genre I’m best at so I have to try lots of different ones! I don’t want to repeat a genre that I’ve already done because working with a variety of styles inspires me and gives me more cinematic energy.”

Takashi Miike

“I don't think about the audience, I don't think about what makes them happy, because there's no way for me to know. They think of the audience as a mass, but in fact every person in the audience is different. So entertainment for everyone doesn't exist.”

Giorgos Lanthimos

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful...it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.”

David Cronenberg

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”

John Carpenter

“In France, I'm an auteur; in Germany, a filmmaker; in Britain, a genre film director; and, in the USA, a bum.”