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.”

Aki Kaurismäki

“Cinema is dead. It died 1962, I think it was in October!”

John Waters

“Some call me director, producer, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.”

George A. Romero

“If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.”

Martin Scorsese

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

Marc Caro

Michel Gondry

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

Shinya Tsukamoto

“It’s strange. Part of me loves a city like Tokyo, but part of me would quite happily destroy it.”

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.”

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.”

Lars von Trier

“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

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.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.”

Terry Gilliam

“You get trapped by stories. Though I've got this reputation for being out of control, it's not true, it just happens to be a more interesting story than the truth.”

Darren Aronofsky

“To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don't think is a good ride.”

Larry Cohen

“The films I've made have all had some point to them. Otherwise, I wouldn't have felt they were worth doing. ”

Guy Maddin

“Whatever I do next, it'll be a horror film.”

Tod Browning

“The thing you have to be most careful of in a mystery story, is not to let it verge on the comic. If a thing gets too gruesome and too horrible, it gets beyond the limits of the average imagination and the audience laughs. It may sound incongruous, but mystery must be made plausible.”

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

“I wanted to make a fake Paris, a Paris of dreams, like in my head when I was twenty and I arrived in Paris for the first time. I wanted to avoid the bad things: traffic jams, dog shit on the street, the rain.”

Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”