Christopher Guest

“Comedy is like music. You have to know the key and you have to find players with good chops.”

D.A. Pennebaker

“You don’t necessarily need a script or actors to tell a compelling tale. Finding a person at a key moment in his life and rendering the truth as you see it—that’s the truest form of drama.”

Judd Apatow

“It's so difficult to shock America these days.”

Mike Nichols

“Nerves provide me with energy...It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that I get worried.”

Albert Brooks

“When I die, if the word ‘thong’ appears in the first or second sentence of my obituary, I’ve screwed up.”

Jonathan Glazer

Errol Morris

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

Alexander Payne

“I thank you for this award, though I think there may be a problem with a world in which making small, human and humorous films is ‘an achievement.’ It should be the norm.”

Michel Gondry

“Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”

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. ”

Sam Mendes

“I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance.”

Emir Kusturica

“What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in…”

Nicolas Roeg

“You make the movie through the cinematography - it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.”

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.”

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.”

Lynne Ramsay

“I've found that film-making's not just a job, it becomes part of your whole life.”

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.”

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. ”

François Truffaut

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

Steven Soderbergh

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