Jacques Demy

"He has an idea of the world he is trying to apply to the cinema or else… an idea of cinema which he applies to the world." —Jean-Luc Godard

Edward Yang

“I was the leader of the Taiwanese new wave. All these guys would just gather in my house, talking and laughing and drinking: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu Nien-jen — just about all of them. You could just push open the door. Everyone just wanted to do similar things. We weren’t allowed to, and no one was willing to give us any money to, but we shared all these idealistic thoughts.”

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.”

Lindsay Anderson

“Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.”

Victor Fleming

“Don’t get excited. Obstacles make a better picture.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

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

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.”

Sam Peckinpah

“The end of a picture is always an end of a life.”

Sofia Coppola

“Perhaps it makes sense that a woman whose earliest memory was on the set of Apocalypse Now would grow up to direct a dark fable about five adolescent girls who unapologetically and unceremoniously kill themselves...”

David Cronenberg

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”

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.”

Marc Forster

“When you grow up like that, and suddenly you decide you intend to make movies, everybody says, 'It's impossible.' And I'm here and I'm living my dream.”

Todd Field

Todd Haynes

“I've always felt more politically comfortable making films that demonstrated problems and didn't tell you how to solve them, but made you feel enough for the subjects who were hurt by these problems...”

Todd Solondz

“Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can’t celebrate humanity but I’m not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.”

John Carpenter

“In France, I'm an auteur; in Germany, a filmmaker; in Britain, a genre film director; and, in the USA, a bum.”

Oliver Stone

“I consider my films first and foremost to be dramas about individuals in personal struggles and I consider myself to be a dramatist before I am a political filmmaker.”

Sam Mendes

“I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance.”

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

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. ”