David Mamet

“A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue. ”

Jean-Pierre Melville

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

Pedro Almodóvar

“I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.”

Ken Loach

“A movie isn't a political movement, a party or even an article. It's just a film. At best it can add its voice to public outrage.”

Paul Schrader

“What fascinates me are people who want to be one thing but who behave in a way contradictory to that. Who might say, ‘I want to be happy, but I keep doing things that make me unhappy.”

Joe Wright

“Every time I make a film, I feel it gives me the chance to learn something new. I've been lucky over the past few years. Things have just happened for me.”

Mark Romanek

David O. Russell

“I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.”

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.”

Michael Haneke

“Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer?”

Whit Stillman

“For me, the present is a golden era that’s ending too. That’s the greatest golden era. Right now. [Laughs.] I just like pining for lost times. I can pine for this morning.”

Alejandro González Iñárritu

“(On why did he not record an audio commentary for 21 Grams) I don't like them. I feel that if you have to explain something it loses strength. It's like a magician trying to explain his magic, in a way.”

Nicolas Winding Refn

“Art is an act of violence.”

Jacques Tati

“Like a dancer learns to dance ... a visual comic learns to use his legs.”

Stanley Kubrick

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

Terry Gilliam

“You get trapped by stories. Though I've got this reputation for being out of control, it's not true, it just happens to be a more interesting story than the truth.”

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.”

Ethan Coen

“We create monsters and then we can't control them. ”

Joel Coen

“The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them. ”

Sofia Coppola

“Perhaps it makes sense that a woman whose earliest memory was on the set of Apocalypse Now would grow up to direct a dark fable about five adolescent girls who unapologetically and unceremoniously kill themselves...”