Alan J. Pakula

“One of the happiest times in my life was during "The Sterile Cuckoo," mostly because of Liza. I've never seen anybody get more joy out of working and it's contagious.”

Mike Leigh

“The whole thing about making films in an organic film location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across”

Frank Borzage

“Make the audience sentimental instead of the player. Make the audience act.”

King Vidor

“My luck was my father not striking oil... we'd have been rich. I'd never have set out for Hollywood with my camera, and I'd have had a lot less interesting life.”

Aleksandr Dovzhenko

“As long as a person lives, there is always a chance to correct mistakes and become a better person.”

Ethan Coen

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

Jiří Trnka

“My desire is to capture a story, but in a single phrase.”

Georg Wilhelm Pabst

“He knows how to create a strange world, whose elements are borrowed from daily life...His characters emerge like his own children, created from fragments of his own heart and mind.”

Luis Buñuel

“If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'”

Abel Gance

“What is the cinema? A sixth art form!”

Karel Reisz

Len Lye

“One of my art teachers put me onto trying to find my own art theory. After many morning walks…an idea hit me that seemed like a complete revelation. It was to compose motion, just as musicians compose sound. [The idea] was to lead me far, far away from wanting to excel in…traditional art.”

Chuck Jones

[On one of his most famous characters] "The coyote is victimized by his own ineptitude. I never understood how to use tools and that's really the coyote's problem."

Jean-Pierre Melville

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

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. ”

Ousmane Sembène

“I am really unable to talk about my life – I don’t know my life. I’ve travelled a lot and this is the life that I have lived, but that doesn’t mean that I know myself.”

Jack Smith

“I was knocking myself out to make this stuff. And I always assumed that people would see this and have pity and give me a little support. [shouts] They didn’t!”

Jacques Rozier

Martin Arnold

“The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.”

David Lynch

“I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead.”