Joss Whedon

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

Park Chan-wook

“The audience seems hazy to me, shrouded in a veil through which I can't see.”

Lars von Trier

“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

Dario Argento

“Horror is the future. And you cannot be afraid. You must push everything to the absolute limit or else life will be boring. People will be boring. Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can't be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.”

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.”

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.”

Michael Cimino

“I don't make movies intellectually. I don't make movies to make a point. I make movies to tell stories about people.”

Michael Ritchie

Lucio Fulci

“Cinema is everything to me. I live and breathe films — I even eat them!”

Clive Barker

“Some people think that horror films are some sort of second class filmmaking, and the only way to bypass that thinking is being proud of the fact that we do it.”

Scott Sanders

Miloš Forman

“The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself.”

Alex Gibney

“The best movies have to be experienced; they can't just be written about.”

Sidney Lumet

“All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.”

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.”

Robert Altman

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Trey Parker

“Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they're the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.”

Sergio Corbucci

“The American Western was too important for our generation. We make them even when we don’t want to.”

Christopher Nolan

“I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today's movies. They believe everything they're hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.”

Walter Hill

“Every film I've done has been a Western. The Western is ultimately a stripped down moral universe that is, whatever the dramatic problems are, beyond the normal avenues of social control and social alleviation of the problem, and I like to do that even within contemporary stories.”