Darren Aronofsky

“To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don't think is a good ride.”

Mike Figgis

“The filmmakers that I have always admired, Altman, Godard, etc., have all been obsessed with the multi-layering of film. For many years, I have been trying to pack in as many ideas into each film as possible. However, it wasn’t until the digital film revolution that I became aware of the possibility of splitting the screen and doing more complex sound mixes.”

Peter Weir

“There’s almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.”

Robert Redford

“Ideas aren't real estate, they grow collectively and that knocks out the egotistical loneliness that generally infects art.”

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

“I wanted to make a fake Paris, a Paris of dreams, like in my head when I was twenty and I arrived in Paris for the first time. I wanted to avoid the bad things: traffic jams, dog shit on the street, the rain.”

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. ”

Susanne Bier

“I use it [hand-held-camera] in order to enable actors to move around freely because I want them to be truthful at all times and that means they should be able to move and not be bound by a fixed camera position. I think if it's used for style it's a mistake. It's there to do something very specific.”

Mira Nair

“I want to question what the outside is and who defines it. I often find those that are considered to be on the outside, extremely inspiring.”

Lisa Cholodenko

Kathryn Bigelow

“I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what my aptitude is, and I really think it's to explore and push the medium. It's not about breaking gender roles or genre traditions.”

Paul Verhoeven

“People love seeing violence and horrible things. The human being is bad and he can't stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness and he'd walk out or fall asleep.”

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...”

Robert Altman

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Stanley Kubrick

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

Robert Rodriguez

“Don't give me any money, don't give me any people, but give freedom, and I'll give you a movie that looks gigantic. ”

Guillermo del Toro

“I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.”

Joel Coen

“The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them. ”

Mel Brooks

“I cut my finger. That’s tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That’s comedy.”

Andy Warhol

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

David Lynch

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