Alejandro González Iñárritu

“(On why did he not record an audio commentary for 21 Grams) I don't like them. I feel that if you have to explain something it loses strength. It's like a magician trying to explain his magic, in a way.”

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.”

Bennett Miller

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.”

Jonathan Raymond

Todd Haynes

“I've always felt more politically comfortable making films that demonstrated problems and didn't tell you how to solve them, but made you feel enough for the subjects who were hurt by these problems...”

Spencer Susser

Sean Durkin

Duncan Jones

“The films that I loved growing up were the science fiction films from the late seventies and early eighties, which were more about the people and how they are affected by the environments that they are in. ”

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.”

Ryan Fleck

Anna Boden

Cary Fukunaga

“Definitely faces are important to me. One of my problems with a lot of things I watch is that everybody’s too pretty and it takes me out of the film because I’m thinking that all these people look like I’ve seen them in a café in Los Angeles.”

Isabel Coixet

“Women blame themselves for everything that is wrong, and men never do that. We have to stop blaming ourselves for what we don’t have and start asking for what we deserve, whether it’s more money or more work or whatever.”

Xavier Dolan

Gregg Araki

“I couldn’t make movies like this if I started to worry about what Jerry Falwell is going to have to say about it.”

Miranda July

“As a filmmaker, the last thing you want to do is place kids in emotional or physical jeopardy. Especially for me, coming from a place of really loving those kids.”

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.”

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...”

Bradley Rust Gray