Alfred Hitchcock

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

Todd Haynes

“I've always felt more politically comfortable making films that demonstrated problems and didn't tell you how to solve them, but made you feel enough for the subjects who were hurt by these problems...”

Jim Jarmusch

“I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are. ”

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.”

Michel Gondry

“Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”

Orson Welles

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

Věra Chytilová

“I have no desire to cuddle my audience.”

Yasujirô Ozu

“I formulated my own directing style in my own head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others… For me there was no such thing as a teacher. I have relied entirely on my own strength.”

Len Wiseman

Terrence Malick

“[On Badlands (1973)] I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.”

Tom Tykwer

“You have to be clear about the characters in the beginning and then you just go for it, but in Winter Sleepers it was really a different approach. You get to know somebody, then maybe at first sight you don't like him. In real life that very often happens”

Ivan Passer

“The way to get me interested in anything is to tell me it’s impossible to make.”

Hou Hsiao-hsien

“The main thing is for the actors to forget the camera. They have to act as if they are working in a documentary.”

Preston Sturges

“The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

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

Pier Paolo Pasolini

“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.”

Sergio Leone

“In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life in jeeps and upset all my dreams.”

Clint Eastwood

“...in America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience. Not to say that it's all bad, but it leaves a lot of the rest of us out of it. To me cinema can be a much more friendly world if there's a lot of things to choose from.”

Johnnie To

“Hollywood can't do this. But we can: we can change things whenever we want.”