Joachim Trier

“I think, to create reality in film, you still have to go through constructedness; you gotta go through a process of artifice anyways. I'm not one of those people who thinks, "Oh, the real person will seem real on the screen;" to create something that is seemingly real takes a lot of work. But having said that, I try to structure the scenes quite tightly, but then within that, leave them some space to go unexpected places.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

Jacques Tati

“Like a dancer learns to dance ... a visual comic learns to use his legs.”

Stanley Kubrick

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

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.”

Joe Wright

“Every time I make a film, I feel it gives me the chance to learn something new. I've been lucky over the past few years. Things have just happened for me.”

Alfred Hitchcock

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

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.”

Gérard Blain

Charlie Chaplin

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

Jean-Luc Godard

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ”

Terrence Malick

“[On Badlands (1973)] I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.”

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.”

Stephen Daldry

“One of the great things about directors is how collegial we feel with each other. We share huge amounts - I get other directors in to see my work all the time and they do the same with me. It's a very warm and generous group of people.”

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.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

“I'll rebel against powers and principalities, all the time. Always, I will.”

Mike Leigh

“The whole thing about making films in an organic film location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across”

David Fincher

“I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.”