Neil Jordan

“My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end. ”

Jean-Jacques Beineix

“[on releasing the director's cut of Betty Blue] Very simple: More sex, more violence, and more money for me.”

Howard Hawks

“I'm a storyteller—that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move!”

Nicolas Roeg

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

Lindsay Anderson

“Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.”

Alfred Hitchcock

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

John Huston

“The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

“I'll rebel against powers and principalities, all the time. Always, I will.”

John Sturges

George Miller

“Lorenzo's Oil or the Babe films or Mad Max or indeed Happy Feet, I think probably they have two things in common. One is very conscious, which is to tell the best story you can, and the second one is that I Like telling stories that basically follow the hero myth.”

Kathryn Bigelow

“I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what my aptitude is, and I really think it's to explore and push the medium. It's not about breaking gender roles or genre traditions.”

Michael Mann

“I cannot just make a film and walk away from it. I need that creative intimacy, and quite frankly, the control to execute my visions, on all my projects.”

Walter Hill

“Every film I've done has been a Western. The Western is ultimately a stripped down moral universe that is, whatever the dramatic problems are, beyond the normal avenues of social control and social alleviation of the problem, and I like to do that even within contemporary stories.”

Peter Weir

“There’s almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.”

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.”

George A. Romero

“If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Ridley Scott

“People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at. ”