Steve McQueen

“My influences come from real life. I’m not interested in cinema for cinema’s sake. I’m interested in life—what one does and how one interacts.”

Theodoros Angelopoulos

“Prizes are prizes, but I still need to tell that story. And being simple is the hardest thing.”

Michael Powell

“I’m not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through the cinema...”

Valerio Zurlini

Carlo Lizzani

Alain Resnais

“I'm always in search of special nonrealistic language that has musicality. ”

Mario Monicelli

“Whenever Italians do something, they do it in a very Italian way, but they try to make sure that everyone is happy.”

Giuseppe de Santis

Pietro Germi

Elio Petri

“Making a movie today needs a lot of madness and a lot of love for cinema. And most probably this is the only positive side of the whole matter.”

Ferzan Ozpetek

“There are a lot of similarities between my films and my life. I know these people as they're inspired by people I know.”

René Clair

“With very few exceptions, the best original scenarios have been written either by writers who knew the cinema particularly well, or by professional film workers. Although it may seem at first sight that anybody should be able to write a film scenario, experience shows that good scenarios are very rare.”

Bernardo Bertolucci

“I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.”

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.”

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...”

Ermanno Olmi

“...our wars of machines and technology make 'progress' ever more impersonal and deadly - a 'progress' that has not guaranteed man's human, moral, and civil growth.”

Eran Riklis

“I make movies for people everywhere in the world. In this respect, I did not feel strange dealing with a story that is not from my immediate environment. Either you tell a true story or you do not.”

Gene Kelly

“I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn’t catch on right away.”

Christophe Honoré

“I’m not a child of the New Wave. I am a grandchild of the New Wave, so I can afford to be more arrogant, light-hearted and playful with the legacy.”

Kenneth Branagh

“I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.”