Laurence Olivier

“Living is strife and torment, disappointment and love and sacrifice, golden sunsets and black storms. I said that some time ago, and today I do not think I would add one word.”

Philip Kaufman

“To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.”

Vincente Minnelli

“I allow an area for improvisation because the chemical things actors bring to stories make it not work. ”

Vittorio De Sica

“I've lost all my money on these films. They are not commercial. But I'm glad to lose it this way. To have for a souvenir of my life pictures like Umberto D. and The Bicycle Thief.”

Clarence Brown

“Maurice Tourneur was my god. I owe him everything I’ve got in the world. For me, he was the greatest man who ever lived. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d still be selling automobiles.”

John Cromwell

Vsevolod Pudovkin

“Editing is the foundation of the film art.”

Aleksandr Dovzhenko

“As long as a person lives, there is always a chance to correct mistakes and become a better person.”

Arthur Penn

“Life is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

Georg Wilhelm Pabst

“He knows how to create a strange world, whose elements are borrowed from daily life...His characters emerge like his own children, created from fragments of his own heart and mind.”

Abel Gance

“What is the cinema? A sixth art form!”

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.”

Hal Ashby

“Hitchhiked to Los Angeles when I was 17. Had about 50 or 60 jobs up to the time I was working as a Multilith operator at good old Republic Studios.”

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.”

Yasujirô Ozu

“I formulated my own directing style in my own head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others… For me there was no such thing as a teacher. I have relied entirely on my own strength.”

Francis Ford Coppola

“I'm in a unique situation. I'm like now an elderly retired guy who made a lot of money, and now I can just, instead of playing golf, I can make art films.”

Henri-Georges Clouzot

“I want only to tell a story. I think movies are entertainment. If at the same time you can get across something you feel, that is perfect.”

Claude Chabrol

“A woman confronting men is a proper subject, it is inexhaustible.”

John Frankenheimer

“I feel that my job is to create an atmosphere where creative people can do their best work. In other words, I have to create an atmosphere where these people feel safe, where they feel respected, and where they feel that they can contribute.”

Jacques Rivette

“What's important for me in a film is that it be alive, that it be imbued with presence, which is basically the same thing. And that this presence, inscribed within the film, possesses a form of magic. There's something profoundly mysterious in this.”