George Stevens

“To produce and direct a movie today, a man really ought to have two heads. It is like trying to be a traffic cop and write a poem at the same time.”

Stanley Donen

“For me directing is like having sex: when it’s good, it’s very good; but when it’s bad, it’s still good.”

Elia Kazan

“I like directors who come on the set and create something that’s a little dangerous, difficult or unusual.”

David Lean

“My distinguishing talent is the ability to put people under the microscope, perhaps to go one or two layers farther down than some other directors.”

Howard Hawks

“I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! ”

Robert Bresson

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Akira Kurosawa

“Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied...that's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.”

Luchino Visconti

“I took a round trip around Hollywood because I think it frightened me. I didn’t want to get burned in that glare.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

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

Jacques Becker

"There are several good ways of making French films. Italian style, like Renoir. Viennese, like Ophuls. New Yorker, like Melville. But only Becker was and is French as France, French as Fontenelle’s rose and Bonnot’s gang." —Jean-Luc Godard

Georges Franju

“Surrealism had taught me that reason comes after creation, and creation is a true deflagration when confronted, not with a solution, but an obstacle.”

Orson Welles

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

Carol Reed

“I give the public what I like, and hope they will like it too.”

Wong Kar-wai

“Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it's the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.”

Jean Cocteau

“Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail. ”

Pietro Germi

Federico Fellini

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

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

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

Marco Bellocchio

“For me a film grows from an image.”