Todd Solondz

“Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can’t celebrate humanity but I’m not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.”

Edgar Wright

“Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget. ”

Mike Hodges

“A film is alive. You shouldn’t stifle it. You should never over art-direct, over conceive, over research, or walk in with an exact idea of how things should be done.”

John McTiernan

“Before I did any action movies, I did a couple of thrillers. That's hung around for me.”

Cameron Crowe

“In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody’s got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about.”

Don Bluth

“With movies, you are always in search is a good story, one that everyone will relate to and love. I love finding those stories and creating a visual world to tell the story.”

Hayao Miyazaki

“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.”

Lawrence Kasdan

John Cassavetes

“The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.”

Charlie Chaplin

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

Jacques Tourneur

“I look for very strong visual unity by using a type of framing and camera movement that is very simple. Everything must come from inside. It mustn’t be superficial. I hate weird camera angles and distorting lenses.”

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.”

Ang Lee

“Things are being simplified a lot for us lately. I think people are hungry for something that shows more respect for the complexity of life, the depth, the grey areas.”

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.”

John Landis

“Directors, like actors, get typecast.”

Danny Boyle

“There's a certain truth that you do end up making the same film again and again so if you vary the genre you have a chance of breaking that cycle.”

Robert Altman

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Jean-Jacques Annaud

“Today’s cinema is a global art form, it is impossible to make movies for a market the size of France, representing no more than 4% of the world’s total.”

Robert Zemeckis

“No matter how many obstacles that are thrown in our path, there are ways to except them and to live through them.”

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.”