Ben Stiller

“I don't have a burning desire to be taken seriously as an actor. I don't have a master plan in that way.”

Judd Apatow

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

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. ”

Don Bluth

“With movies, you are always in search is a good story, one that everyone will relate to and love. I love finding those stories and creating a visual world to tell the story.”

Alan Smithee

[Don Siegel on the Smithee pseudonym] "I told my young friends who wanted to be directors to change their name to Smithee and take credit for direction of the picture (Death of a Gunfighter). I don't know if anyone did this."

Thomas Lee

Park Chan-wook

“The audience seems hazy to me, shrouded in a veil through which I can't see.”

Jessica Yu

Katsuhiro Ôtomo

“As I originally developed [AKIRA], I used each issue to build more depth and size into this mammoth city [Neo-Tokyo]. I kept trying to achieve this by creating a variety of situations to stage the graphic storytelling. But with film you get to combine all this into one and I think that it is much more convincing on film than in a serialised comic strip.”

Chen Kaige

“For me, the project I would most like to do someday would be about the Cultural Revolution. I’ve never bothered to come up with a story because no film on that subject would ever be sanctioned today. But tomorrow things might be different.”

Atom Egoyan

“I think with all directors there are ideas that recur, at least for the ones that have creative control of their films.”

Roy Andersson

“I felt that film-making generally didn't reach the level you could find in painting or literature or music. It was for one-time use only, and more and more, the movies were losing their visual power - they were concentrating on the plot only. That's why I started wanting to be a film director myself. It wasn't only the plot that was interesting; it was the touch, the feeling, something visually rich.”

Grant Gee

Jack Cardiff

“I was not a technical person - I was never a technical person. I have always liked the more artistic side of things and I did get a lot of inspiration and knowledge from studying painting - that was very important.”

Sidney Lumet

“All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.”

Corey Yuen

Wong Kar-wai

“Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it's the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.”

Joseph Kahn

Danis Tanović

“When reading a script, I try to find the essence of each scene and what it can contribute to the subject as a whole. I then dream about my film. I work while lying down on my sofa, as if at a session with a psychoanalyst. Danis, the patient, relates his story to Tanovic, the psychologist. Visions appear to me with such precision that I can then shoot and edit them very quickly.”

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