Elia Kazan

“I like directors who come on the set and create something that’s a little dangerous, difficult or unusual.”

Marcel Duchamp

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

George Cukor

“I don't weep or anything, but there's always some part of me left bloody on the scene I've just directed.”

Catherine Breillat

“When I shoot a film, I always project myself into one of the characters, at once into either a man or a woman...”

Frank Capra

“My advice to young filmmakers is this: Don’t follow trends. Start them!”

George Stevens

“To produce and direct a movie today, a man really ought to have two heads. It is like trying to be a traffic cop and write a poem at the same time.”

Alain Resnais

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

Luchino Visconti

“I took a round trip around Hollywood because I think it frightened me. I didn’t want to get burned in that glare.”

Samuel Fuller

“Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.”

Edmund Goulding

Michael Powell

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

Steven Soderbergh

“To me the director's job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.”

Germaine Dulac

Ida Lupino

“I'd love to see more women working as directors and producers. Today it's almost impossible to do it unless you are an actress or writer with power...I wouldn't hesitate right this minute to hire a talented woman if the subject matter were right.”

Louis Malle

“You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.”

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.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

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

Woody Allen

“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”

Georges Franju

“Surrealism had taught me that reason comes after creation, and creation is a true deflagration when confronted, not with a solution, but an obstacle.”

Sergei Eisenstein

“Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?”