Ridley Scott

“People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at. ”

Christopher Nolan

“I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today's movies. They believe everything they're hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.”

François Truffaut

“I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.”

Gus Van Sant

“I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.”

Fatih Akin

“The funnier it is in the beginning of a story, the more dramatic it can become. Because when an audience is laughing, that's opening their souls somehow, and when you have an audience with an open soul, it's much better to hit them with a knife.”

Ang Lee

“Things are being simplified a lot for us lately. I think people are hungry for something that shows more respect for the complexity of life, the depth, the grey areas.”

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.”

Michael Mann

“I cannot just make a film and walk away from it. I need that creative intimacy, and quite frankly, the control to execute my visions, on all my projects.”

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.”

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.”

Federico Fellini

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

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.”

Andrei Tarkovsky

“Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

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

Abbas Kiarostami

“But in all, I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. These are the things I don't like in the movies.”

Ken Loach

“A movie isn't a political movement, a party or even an article. It's just a film. At best it can add its voice to public outrage.”

Karel Reisz

Tony Richardson

“It’s no exaggeration to say that the ‘sequence’ group changed the whole way of feeling and thinking about film in England – at any rate for a few inspiring years, before the British sank once again into complacency and philistinism.”

Stephen Frears

“When you’re starting, what you chiefly have is energy and passion and that will go a long way to cover a certain amount of funkiness in how you tell a story. But you’re never going to make a film late in your career the way you made it at the beginning and to try to is insane.”

John Cassavetes

“The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.”