Michael Hui

“I think I always had a tendency to make people laugh ever since I was a kid, although I may not be aware of it…”

Shinji Aoyama

“I merely make films about what comes into me from the outside, and making films is about putting what's within me outside again. I consider myself a hollow container. That's what's most important when I make my films. I myself am empty.”

John Woo

“The movies I like to make are very rich and full of passion. Some people see me as an action director, but action is not the only thing in my movies. I always like to show human nature - something deep inside the heart.”

Ringo Lam

[On Jean-Claude Van Damme]: “He couldn’t act for shit.”

Peter Jackson

“I don't quite know what an auteur is. I've never quite understood that term, because filmmaking is such a huge team effort.”

Jonathan Demme

“I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters. ”

Wes Anderson

“I know that feeling of looking back and thinking, that part I'd like to fix. So I obsessively try not to compromise.”

Judd Apatow

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

Greg Mottola

Richard Kelly

“I don’t ever want to make an impersonal film.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

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

David Gordon Green

“People think 'independent' means no interference. Not true. Unless you're paying for everything yourself, you're always subject to who's writing the checks.”

Kevin Smith

“There's something to be said for failing. It's not the failure you feel, it's the failure that people project when something disappoints. You're back to ground zero, where there's no expectations, and that's where I like to be.”

Peter Greenaway

“I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.”

Éric Rohmer

“I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak.”

Julian Schnabel

“Some people must go to extremes to get the world in balance for themselves. Some can't bear bright lights, so wherever they go they search for the dark; they turn the lights down, anything to sustain some level of comfort.”

Luis Buñuel

“If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'”

Walter Salles

“The necessity to conceptualize has to come very early on, and defining a vector of development for that film also at the beginning of the process will allow you much more freedom as you go along.”

Alfonso Cuarón

“The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.”

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.”