Bertrand Tavernier

“I rarely produce movies that go from shot, to reverse shot, etc. I always try to avoid that. Either I do a long take, a complex camera movement, or I will break the scene with an unexpected closeup. I try to work that way, to get away from the rules and be free from formal conventions.”

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.”

David Fincher

“I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.”

Abel Ferrara

“I was raised a Catholic and when you're raised a Catholic they don't teach you to think for yourself...you're taught not to think too deeply about things.”

Orson Welles

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

Sidney Lumet

“All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.”

George Roy Hill

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.”

Jules Dassin

“If there is anything I want to be remembered for, it is for fulfilling Melina's dream [the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece].”

Neil Jordan

“My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end. ”

David Cronenberg

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”