Edgar Wright

“Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget. ”

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.”

Laurence Olivier

“Living is strife and torment, disappointment and love and sacrifice, golden sunsets and black storms. I said that some time ago, and today I do not think I would add one word.”

Eli Roth

“I’ll direct any movie starring a monkey or the Olsen Twins. Preferably both.”

D.W. Griffith

“A film without a message is just a waste of time.”

Richard Ayoade

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

Ang Lee

“Things are being simplified a lot for us lately. I think people are hungry for something that shows more respect for the complexity of life, the depth, the grey areas.”

Mervyn LeRoy

[On first meeting Lana Turner] “She was so nervous her hands were shaking. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and she was so shy she could hardly look me in the face. Yet there was something so endearing about her that I knew she was the right girl. She had tremendous appeal, which I knew the audience would feel.”

Shekhar Kapur

“I've never looked at film-making as a career. I've looked on film-making as an adventure. When you come down the mountain, you get ready to climb again.”

David Cronenberg

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”

Elia Kazan

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

Orson Welles

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

Charlie Chaplin

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

Tim Burton

“I've always loved the idea of fairy tales, but somehow I never managed to completely connect with them. What interests me is taking those classic images and themes and trying to contemporize them a bit. I believe folk tales and fairy tales have some sort of psychological foundation that makes that possible.”

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...”

Ken Russell

“Life is too short to make destructive films about people one doesn’t like. My films are meant to be constructive and illuminating.”

Stanley Kubrick

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

James Wan

“We think craft is important, and the irony has always been that horror may be disregarded by critics, but often they are the best-made movies you're going to find in terms of craft. You can't scare people if they see the seams.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”