Aleksandr Sokurov

“The surface of the screen and that of the canvas are one and the same.”

Pietro Marcello

Edgar Wright

“Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget. ”

Artour Aristakisian

Monte Hellman

“I've been in love with the movies as long as I can remember.”

Tom Noonan

“I don't think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away.”

Bruce Robinson

“My whole philosophy of film-making – not that I’ve done it much – is that it’s a conspiracy. Conspire in Latin means ‘to breathe with’, and that’s how I feel about making a film. I want everyone to be making the film, not just me telling them what to do, because these guys are all experts in their field”

Miranda July

“As a filmmaker, the last thing you want to do is place kids in emotional or physical jeopardy. Especially for me, coming from a place of really loving those kids.”

René Clair

“With very few exceptions, the best original scenarios have been written either by writers who knew the cinema particularly well, or by professional film workers. Although it may seem at first sight that anybody should be able to write a film scenario, experience shows that good scenarios are very rare.”

Béla Tarr

“I think censorship is always there. Then it was the censorship of the state and now it's the censorship of the market.”

Olivier Assayas

“With Irma Vep, all of a sudden I decided that it was okay to mix genre, to mix cultures, and that movies sometimes could be experiments, that within the format of modern cinema, within the format of narrative, you could experiment by mixing elements.”

Jacques Rivette

“What's important for me in a film is that it be alive, that it be imbued with presence, which is basically the same thing. And that this presence, inscribed within the film, possesses a form of magic. There's something profoundly mysterious in this.”

Éric Rohmer

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

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.”

David Maysles

“The most exciting thing in life is to watch the meeting of two strangers.”

Albert Maysles

“Documentary can requote reality I think more honestly and authentically, when done properly, than any other medium. If it is practiced properly, then it is more like photography than cinematography.”

John Sayles

“Oh, I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.”

Owen Land

“I think I applied a painterly way of thinking to film at the time. Let me explain what I mean. In painting you start with a blank canvas, you start with nothing and you create your image, particle by particle; whereas in film, usually, you just open your lens and you have a vast quantity of objects which become parts of your image. They are opposite processes. Being a painter, I wanted to create an image, to really make a film.”

Carlo Lizzani

Giuseppe de Santis