Nicolas Winding Refn

“Art is an act of violence.”

Tony Scott

“It was just a different way of doing things, and I`m often criticized for attempting difference, which is misinterpreted as style over content.”

Peter Tscherkassky

“I refer to my work as being cinematographic poetry and that’s why I love that layering, those superimpositions, right from the beginning of my filmic work.”

Jan Švankmajer

“I never call myself an animated filmmaker because I am interested not in animation techniques or creating a complete illusion, but in bringing life to everyday objects.”

Hal Hartley

“Despite the fact that I love story, character and dialogue, when I isolate the primary elements of film I find photography, movement and sound recording — in that order. Only then do I consider dramatic action. Film is essentially graphic for me.”

Larry Clark

“Why didn’t they go further? If I’d done that film, I would have done it differently.”

Billy Bob Thornton

“I can't sit through plays and musical theatre. I just want to run up onstage and mess up their hair and turn over the furniture.”

Don Hertzfeldt

“Some people can do great things with CG, but that world just doesn’t interest me or inspire me. I’ve never felt really creative or intuitive using software. I like paper and pens and paint. I need to angle real lights on my artwork and work with my hands and build props. Computers just take all that fun out of it.”

Victor Ruano

“There are four elements that make up the foundation of my memories and of my present, that is to say, of me. They gave birth to and laced themselves through all the situations that mold my life.”

Maya Deren

“The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.”

Agnès Varda

“I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.”

Seijun Suzuki

“I was never rebellious, I was just mischievous!”

Anton Corbijn

“I don't like a very fast film; I wanted a film where there would be time for someone to walk through a room because I like movement by people.”

Allison Schulnik

“I know that I seem to be drawn to sad characters, the forlorn reject. Something about being on the outside. The outcast. But I also am intrigued by the super confident fool. He too is a reject.”

Bernardo Bertolucci

“I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.”

John Boorman

“I have sought that lost grace in the film-making process, where the material things of the world – money, buildings, sets, plastic, metal, people – disappear into a camera and become nothing but light and shadow flickering on a wall: matter into spirit, the alchemists would say.”

Gerardo Naranjo

Nick Broomfield

“If you’re making a film, it’s more honest to make your presence felt than to hang back furtively on the other side of the room, because no-one really benefits from that. That approach really is, to use the dread word, voyeuristic. You’re there with all your equipment, but pretending you’re not there.”

Damian Calvo

Bill Plympton

“In a perfect world, I would prefer just to draw all day and make these cartoons. But the problem is, if I work for a big studio, then I would lose a lot of my creative ideas.”