Louis Malle

“You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.”

Joseph Kahn

Wolfgang Reitherman

“It was a romance from the start. The minute you know you can make a drawing move, the static drawing loses its appeal: movement is life. Animation represents the greatest breakthrough in 20th Century art.”

Ronald Neame

“One of the things I do feel about today’s films is that they are too frenetic. There’s too much cut cut cut cut cut. When something is playing beautifully, and you have beautiful actors, you don’t have to cut all the time, because it doesn’t help the scene. It just destroys it.”

Frank Launder

Michael Curtiz

“The only things you regret are the things you don't do.”

Todd Field

Brad Bird

“We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.”

Tsai Ming-liang

“The body always plays an important role in my films. You could say the body is the most beautiful thing we have or you could say it’s the ugliest thing we have. We can sell bodies, we can adore or worship bodies.”

Busby Berkeley

“In an era of breadlines, depression and wars, I tried to help people get away from all the misery…to turn their minds to something else. I wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour.”

Preston Sturges

“The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.”

Frederick Wiseman

“There are lots of different ways to make film. I don’t believe there has to be any orthodox way to making movies, or any rules. It’s what works for the filmmaker, and, theoretically, the audience.”

Agnès Jaoui

“For us, the main theme of “Let It Rain” was how all these people, with their different subjects and problems, the common agent is that they all feel the victim of something and they all need to be recognized in their pain. People say, ‘I suffered, I suffered,’ sometimes forgetting others are suffering too.”

Catherine Breillat

“When I shoot a film, I always project myself into one of the characters, at once into either a man or a woman...”

Lukas Moodysson

“I'm not particularly interested in probing the depths of my soul; I'm more into probing the world around me.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

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

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.”

George Cukor

“I don't weep or anything, but there's always some part of me left bloody on the scene I've just directed.”

Alexander Payne

“I thank you for this award, though I think there may be a problem with a world in which making small, human and humorous films is ‘an achievement.’ It should be the norm.”

Woody Allen

“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”