Errol Morris

“The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.”

Romain Gavras

Mikhail Kalatozov

Julian Schnabel

“Some people must go to extremes to get the world in balance for themselves. Some can't bear bright lights, so wherever they go they search for the dark; they turn the lights down, anything to sustain some level of comfort.”

Oliver Stone

“I consider my films first and foremost to be dramas about individuals in personal struggles and I consider myself to be a dramatist before I am a political filmmaker.”

Catherine Breillat

“When I shoot a film, I always project myself into one of the characters, at once into either a man or a woman...”

Steven Soderbergh

“To me the director's job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.”

Paul Schrader

“What fascinates me are people who want to be one thing but who behave in a way contradictory to that. Who might say, ‘I want to be happy, but I keep doing things that make me unhappy.”

Park Chan-wook

“The audience seems hazy to me, shrouded in a veil through which I can't see.”

Stephen Frears

“When you’re starting, what you chiefly have is energy and passion and that will go a long way to cover a certain amount of funkiness in how you tell a story. But you’re never going to make a film late in your career the way you made it at the beginning and to try to is insane.”

Terry Zwigoff

“I keep going back to the Forties and Fifties for films, I go back to the Twenties and Thirties for music. For some reason I really like these films from the Forties and Fifties, whether they’re American, French, whatever… I can’t quite put my finger on it, “dark” is the best way I know to describe the quality that I like in them.”

Allan King

“[Cinema-]verite is the most terrifying, challenging and, if it works, the most rewarding filmmaking experience. It's the next best thing to being a writer.”

Lars von Trier

“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

Dario Argento

“Horror is the future. And you cannot be afraid. You must push everything to the absolute limit or else life will be boring. People will be boring. Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can't be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.”

Joseph Losey

“Films can illustrate our existence…they can distress, disturb and provoke people into thinking about themselves and certain problems. But NOT give the answers.”

Ramin Bahrani

“Film is really 24 frames a second in the present, and I realize when you leave certain gaps, it allows space for the viewer to enter the film.”

David Gordon Green

“People think 'independent' means no interference. Not true. Unless you're paying for everything yourself, you're always subject to who's writing the checks.”

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.”

Adam Elliot

“All my films are essentially about difference and the way we perceive ourselves and others.”

Jacques Audiard

“I’m a long-term student but also a committed autodidact. Therefore I’m as much interested in the ways people learn things for themselves as in the way they do through dialogue and communication. I like to film the way someone moves who is acquiring a new skill or learning something about the world.”