Agnès Varda

“I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.”

Ben Hecht

“A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.”

Edward Dmytryk

“In art, the obvious is a sin.”

André De Toth

Akira Kurosawa

“Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied...that's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.”

Kimberly Peirce

“I like to go for the reality, I like to go for what's underneath. And I don't even judge it. But that isn't what all Hollywood movies are. That's an example where my success in Boys [Don't Cry] brought me this great Hollywood career and all these offers that I really appreciate, but I really have a very particular thing that I like doing. I love real emotion, I love real drama.”

Joseph H. Lewis

“[explaining how he got the nickname Wagon Wheel Joe] I carried a box filled with different wagon wheels. Whenever I’d come to a scene which was just disgraceful in dialogue and all, I’d place a wagon wheel in one portion of the frame, and make an artistic shot out of it, so by the time the scene was over you only saw the artistic value and couldn’t analyze what the scene was about.”

Mitchell Leisen

“The camera never moves arbitrarily in any of my films. It follows somebody across the room or some kind of action; therefore you are not particularly conscious of the camera moving. Unnecessary camera movement destroys the concentration of the audience.”

Alan Rudolph

“I'm me, I live from film to mouth.”

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.”

Maya Deren

“The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.”

Gregory La Cava

Ernst Lubitsch

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

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.”

Samuel Fuller

“Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.”

François Truffaut

“I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.”

Luchino Visconti

“I took a round trip around Hollywood because I think it frightened me. I didn’t want to get burned in that glare.”

Max Ophüls

“Paris, which had always amused me on holiday, was too lovely… Emigration was no hardship, it was an outing. It offered the shining wet boulevards under the street lights, breakfast in Monmartre with cognac in your glass, coffee and lukewarm brioche, gigolos and prostitutes at night… Everyone in the world has two fatherlands: his own and Paris.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”

Wong Kar-wai

“Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it's the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.”