John Huston

“The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on.”

Jack Hill

“I liked the Warner Bros. movies of the forties. That’s my main influence. The noirs and the gangster films.”

Hal Ashby

“I was a kid looking for something but I didn’t know what. The movie business seemed like a terrific thing to get into, because that’s where the money and the fun was at.”

Costa-Gavras

“My mother used to say ‘stay away from politics’, because my father went to prison. But if you reject politics, you reject a lot of relationships. The worst thing in society is individualism.”

Wes Anderson

“I know that feeling of looking back and thinking, that part I'd like to fix. So I obsessively try not to compromise.”

Robert Altman

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Billy Wilder

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.”

Frank Tashlin

“I got into a fight with Walt Disney: I always pick the wrong people to fight with.”

Elaine May

“The only thing experience teaches you is what you can't do. When you start, you think you can do anything. And then you start to get a little tired.”

John Frankenheimer

“I feel that my job is to create an atmosphere where creative people can do their best work. In other words, I have to create an atmosphere where these people feel safe, where they feel respected, and where they feel that they can contribute.”

Arthur Penn

“Life is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”

François Truffaut

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

Terence Fisher

“Do I believe in the supernatural? Oh yes, certainly. I can’t believe, I can’t accept that you die and that’s the end. Physically maybe it is a fact. But there’s something about the mind that’s more than that.”

Frank Perry

Jean-Pierre Melville

“I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.”

Orson Welles

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

Otto Preminger

[Giving direction to a group of children on Exodus (1960)] "Cry, you little monsters!"

Roman Polanski

“You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.”

Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”