Lee Daniels

“I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn't like the one, two, three-boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene.”

Marialy Rivas

Lou Ye

“Ninety years ago politicians told us we had to believe in Marxism and Leninism. Fifty years ago they told us we had to follow Chairman Mao’s words and join the Cultural Revolution with passion. Thirty years ago they told us we had to reform and open up. Ten years ago they told us that making money was of great importance, while two years ago they told us everything was for the Olympics. ”

Joss Whedon

“If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.”

Andrew Dominik

“I’d like to make more movies, man, but I don’t want to just make movies. I want to make the movies I want to make.”

Matteo Garrone

“I’d obviously like to find my own way and not be considered an imitator. Some have claimed my style is a new neorealism. But neorealism is of course a style that is connected to an earlier period of Italian cinema. I do owe a great debt to those directors — to Rossellini and many others.”

Bennett Miller

Andrew Haigh

“Films are so over-edited nowadays. Nobody gives things the space to just exist. You don’t need to be chopping back and forwards. People like Antonioni were happy to just let things exist.”

Gerardo Naranjo

Bong Joon-ho

“Human beings basically express their feelings in the same way. They feel the same feelings. If you look at two foreigners talking to each other, you soon can see if they are fighting, or are in love.”

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.”

Giorgos Lanthimos

J.J. Abrams

“Especially in television, the more that you’re telling a story about a family, the better the show ends up being. And the family can be a family, a group of friends or the members of a starship. You’re telling the story of relationships and how characters grow.”

Cédric Klapisch

“In a way all my films have looked at the question of how a person exists in relationship to a group. The subject that I keep coming back to is the link, and the difference, between individual issues and social issues.”

Sam Peckinpah

“The end of a picture is always an end of a life.”

Mikhail Kalatozov

Jean-Jacques Beineix

“[on releasing the director's cut of Betty Blue] Very simple: More sex, more violence, and more money for me.”

Jesper Ganslandt

“You have to be able to portray guys as human beings.”

Gaspar Noé

“A lot of people cry at the end of the movie. Some people come out and smoke a cigarette. Some people go for a walk or a cigarette in the middle of the movie. Each person handles the movie as he wants...”

Kelly Reichardt

“I like working in a really private way. I mean, we got as far as a cut of [Old Joy] without speaking to any kind of lawyer or anything. We got into Sundance before we thought we should form a company. Aside from a lot of sound work and stuff still to go, it was all very private, and that’s a dream for me.”