Preston Sturges

“The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.”

D.W. Griffith

“A film without a message is just a waste of time.”

Max Ophüls

“Paris, which had always amused me on holiday, was too lovely… Emigration was no hardship, it was an outing. It offered the shining wet boulevards under the street lights, breakfast in Monmartre with cognac in your glass, coffee and lukewarm brioche, gigolos and prostitutes at night… Everyone in the world has two fatherlands: his own and Paris.”

Josef von Sternberg

“I care nothing about the story, only how it is photographed and presented.”

Jean Renoir

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.”

Orson Welles

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

Carl Theodor Dreyer

“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”

Humphrey Jennings

"Humphrey Jennings is the only real poet the British Cinema has yet produced" - Lindsay Anderson

Luis Buñuel

“I distrust reason and culture. In our thoughts there are images that appear suddenly, without us pondering them. In all my films, even the most conventional ones, is the tendency to irrational conduct that can not be explained logically.”

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.”

Buster Keaton

“I don't act anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.”

Satyajit Ray

“What is attempted in these films is of course a synthesis. But it can be seen by someone who has his feet in both cultures. Someone who will bring to bear on the films involvement and detachment in equal measure.”

Anthony Mann

"Primarily known for his Westerns, Mann portrayed a world of violence against some of the most striking natural vistas in cinema history. His crime films are gritty and real, and all his work reflects an exploration of the complex psychology of the human soul." —William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)

Kevin Brownlow

Fritz Lang

“I should say that I was a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears...to my constant regret.”

Elia Kazan

“I like directors who come on the set and create something that’s a little dangerous, difficult or unusual.”

Chris Marker

“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”

Ken Russell

“Life is too short to make destructive films about people one doesn’t like. My films are meant to be constructive and illuminating.”

Ernst Lubitsch

“There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.”

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”