Pedro Almodóvar

“I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.”

Steven Soderbergh

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

Miranda July

“As a filmmaker, the last thing you want to do is place kids in emotional or physical jeopardy. Especially for me, coming from a place of really loving those kids.”

Andrew Stanton

“A lot of people think if they make a computer-animated film, it's going to be a hit. I'm afraid we're going to see a glut of really bad films in the next couple of years.”

Duncan Jones

“The films that I loved growing up were the science fiction films from the late seventies and early eighties, which were more about the people and how they are affected by the environments that they are in. ”

Michael Powell

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

Spike Jonze

“Being able to shoot on videos and commercials — just being on the set, with only a certain amount of time and shots and sequences to do in that amount of time, learning how to work with the crew the physical production and the limitations — is all good training.”

Mike Leigh

“The whole thing about making films in an organic film location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across”

Ethan Coen

“We create monsters and then we can't control them. ”

Joel Coen

“The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them. ”

Guillermo del Toro

“I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.”

Alejandro González Iñárritu

“(On why did he not record an audio commentary for 21 Grams) I don't like them. I feel that if you have to explain something it loses strength. It's like a magician trying to explain his magic, in a way.”

Joe Wright

“Every time I make a film, I feel it gives me the chance to learn something new. I've been lucky over the past few years. Things have just happened for me.”

Tom Hooper

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.”

David Fincher

“I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.”

Marc Forster

“When you grow up like that, and suddenly you decide you intend to make movies, everybody says, 'It's impossible.' And I'm here and I'm living my dream.”

Charlie Chaplin

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

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.”

Christopher Nolan

“I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today's movies. They believe everything they're hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.”