Curtis Harrington

“I wrote the script based on a short story I had written that was never published. And then I had met Dennis Hopper because he came to see some of my short experimental films at a coffeehouse in Los Angeles. When I went to him with the script of Night Tide, he immediately agreed to do it.”

Robert Florey

Joseph H. Lewis

“[explaining how he got the nickname Wagon Wheel Joe] I carried a box filled with different wagon wheels. Whenever I’d come to a scene which was just disgraceful in dialogue and all, I’d place a wagon wheel in one portion of the frame, and make an artistic shot out of it, so by the time the scene was over you only saw the artistic value and couldn’t analyze what the scene was about.”

Guy Maddin

“Whatever I do next, it'll be a horror film.”

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

David Lynch

“I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead.”

Seijun Suzuki

“I was never rebellious, I was just mischievous!”

Henri-Georges Clouzot

“I want only to tell a story. I think movies are entertainment. If at the same time you can get across something you feel, that is perfect.”

Nicholas Ray

“You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.”

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.”

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.”

Jean Painlevé

Kenneth Anger

[On unemployed filmmakers] "It seems much easier for these people to rent my films, look at them and make notes, than to give them a job."

Jean Cocteau

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

Jean-Luc Godard

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ”

Tod Browning

“The thing you have to be most careful of in a mystery story, is not to let it verge on the comic. If a thing gets too gruesome and too horrible, it gets beyond the limits of the average imagination and the audience laughs. It may sound incongruous, but mystery must be made plausible.”

Alfred Hitchcock

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

Stuart Gordon

[On H. P. Lovecraft] That's the thing, he used his phobias. Fear of things that are different or unknown is sort of a central theme to a lot of his stories.

John Carpenter

“In France, I'm an auteur; in Germany, a filmmaker; in Britain, a genre film director; and, in the USA, a bum.”