Jean-Claude Labrecque:

"Once you've mastered technique, you're home free. You can gamble a bit and experiment."

"I'd like basic film stock to remain a force to be reckoned with. Film is made for moviemaking. We need to build on this great strength because film can capture whatever you want. The initial shot of an image, for example, is so much stronger on film than on digital. The results on film are still far better than with a digital camera."

LENI RIEFENSTAHL:

"I am not interested in purely realistic , slice-of-life, every-day ordinariness. I love all that is beautiful, strong, healthy and alive."

Stanley Kubrick:

"The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle."

"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later."

• "One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film."

• "A director with a camera is as free and unrestricted as an author with a pen."

Ingmar Bergman:

Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

David Fincher:
I went to a place called the Berkley Film Institute for a summer program with a grade school friend of mine, and we just thought it was a joke. It was very impressionist, very Berkley. There were all these people who were there to communicate and change the world, to do all these lofty things -- and then they made these really shitty, stupid little movies. And we were kind of like, "I'm not here for this, I'm just here to pull cable." We were the youngest people there and we ended up being the grips and electrics on everybody else's movies, and it was pretty good those six or seven weeks, we got to shoot Panaflex cameras and make a married print - it was in black and white and you made these little cheese-ball movies, but at least you were making "something." It was kind of like film school in that way, but those who can't do, teach, and those who couldn't teach, taught there. They tried, they just didn't want to get dirty with it, they didn't want to get in up to their necks. It was all very patrician."

"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 (1975) is the fact that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again."

"Directing ain't about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn't want to go to film school. I didn't know what the point was. The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two."

TIM BURTON:

"Those films where the images speak to you, I've seen Black Sunday probably 20 times and I still can't remember the story but the images stay with you forever. That's the kind of film that really speaks to me."

"The place and the mood and the feel of it is very important, it's treated as another character in the piece and it's very nice when you're able to look at an image and goes inside as opposed to just thinking about it. Those are the films that stay with me."