Orson Welles

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

Chris Marker

“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”

D.A. Pennebaker

“You don’t necessarily need a script or actors to tell a compelling tale. Finding a person at a key moment in his life and rendering the truth as you see it—that’s the truest form of drama.”

David Maysles

“The most exciting thing in life is to watch the meeting of two strangers.”

Leni Riefenstahl

“I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I have looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life. ”

Miguel Pereira

Andrew Dominik

“I’d like to make more movies, man, but I don’t want to just make movies. I want to make the movies I want to make.”

Mike Nichols

“Nerves provide me with energy...It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that I get worried.”

Carol Reed

“I give the public what I like, and hope they will like it too.”

Wes Anderson

“I know that feeling of looking back and thinking, that part I'd like to fix. So I obsessively try not to compromise.”

Eduardo Mignogna

Steve McQueen

“My influences come from real life. I’m not interested in cinema for cinema’s sake. I’m interested in life—what one does and how one interacts.”

Nicolas Winding Refn

“Art is an act of violence.”

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...”

Melvin Van Peebles

“I make a film like I cook for friends. I hope they like it, but if they don't, I'm prepared to enjoy it all by myself.”

Víctor Erice

“I think that among the arts, cinema is the least known. Its history is generally ignored, and so is, above all, its real nature. As cinema is the most secret of all artistic languages, it is also the least understood.”

Armando Bó

Alan Ball

“I think it's very difficult and it requires a tremendous amount of spiritual integrity and discipline to not be a narcissist in a culture that encourages it every step of the way.”

Nicholas Ray

“You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.”

Jeff Nichols