Takashi Miike

“I don't think about the audience, I don't think about what makes them happy, because there's no way for me to know. They think of the audience as a mass, but in fact every person in the audience is different. So entertainment for everyone doesn't exist.”

Bryan Singer

“We don't live in the world of reality, we live in the world of how we perceive reality. ”

Jacques Tati

“Like a dancer learns to dance ... a visual comic learns to use his legs.”

Bernardo Bertolucci

“I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.”

Clint Eastwood

“...in America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience. Not to say that it's all bad, but it leaves a lot of the rest of us out of it. To me cinema can be a much more friendly world if there's a lot of things to choose from.”

Jackie Chan

“Don't try to be like Jackie. There is only one Jackie. Study computers instead.”

Park Chan-wook

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

Michael Haneke

“Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer?”

Paul Thomas Anderson

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

Spike Jonze

“Being able to shoot on videos and commercials — just being on the set, with only a certain amount of time and shots and sequences to do in that amount of time, learning how to work with the crew the physical production and the limitations — is all good training.”

Michel Gondry

“Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

“I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.”

Kihachi Okamoto

Hayao Miyazaki

“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.”

Bong Joon-ho

“Human beings basically express their feelings in the same way. They feel the same feelings. If you look at two foreigners talking to each other, you soon can see if they are fighting, or are in love.”

Shôhei Imamura

“I show true things using fictional techniques but maintaining truthfulness — that's where my approach differs from Ozu. He wanted to make film more aesthetic. I want to make it more real. He aspired toward a cinematic nirvana. When I was his assistant, I was very opposed to him, but now, whilst still not liking his films, I'm much more tolerant. As for me, I'd like to destroy this premise that cinema is fiction.”

Federico Fellini

“What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one...”

François Truffaut

“I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”

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.”