Christopher Nolan

“I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today's movies. They believe everything they're hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.”

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.”

Buster Keaton

“I don't act anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.”

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.”

Alfonso Cuarón

“The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.”

Billy Wilder

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.”

John Greyson

John Sayles

“Oh, I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.”

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.”

Ridley Scott

“People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at. ”

David Lynch

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

Preston Sturges

“The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.”

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.”

John Ford

“I hate the cinema. But I like making westerns.”

Peter Greenaway

“I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.”

Alain Resnais

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

Andrei Tarkovsky

“Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”

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.”

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?”

Jean Renoir

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.”