John Hillcoat

[About his films] “There is a connection in that all three deal in extreme environments and characters under extreme conflict. I have to say I am most happy with "The Proposition". I've got my reservations on all three but I'm most happy with this one.”

William Wyler

“I made over forty Westerns. I used to lie awake nights trying to think up new ways of getting on and off a horse.”

Michael Powell

“I’m not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through the cinema...”

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

“I wanted to make a fake Paris, a Paris of dreams, like in my head when I was twenty and I arrived in Paris for the first time. I wanted to avoid the bad things: traffic jams, dog shit on the street, the rain.”

Terry Gilliam

“You get trapped by stories. Though I've got this reputation for being out of control, it's not true, it just happens to be a more interesting story than the truth.”

Darren Aronofsky

“To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don't think is a good ride.”

Lindsay Anderson

“Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.”

Masaki Kobayashi

“In any era, I am critical of authoritarian power.”

Clint Eastwood

“...in America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience. Not to say that it's all bad, but it leaves a lot of the rest of us out of it. To me cinema can be a much more friendly world if there's a lot of things to choose from.”

Sam Peckinpah

“The end of a picture is always an end of a life.”

Alfonso Cuarón

“The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.”

Alfred Hitchcock

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

John Ford

“I hate the cinema. But I like making westerns.”

Kihachi Okamoto

François Truffaut

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

Wes Anderson

“I know that feeling of looking back and thinking, that part I'd like to fix. So I obsessively try not to compromise.”

Andrew Dominik

Billy Wilder

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

Sergio Leone

“In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life in jeeps and upset all my dreams.”

Kinji Fukasaku

“Known primarily in the West for directing such features as Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and the controversial Battle Royale (2000), maverick Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku established himself early on with a series of Toei Studio yakuza movies.”