What suggests is superior to what shows. Movies today show more and more. It's paranoid dictator cinema. What we need is schizophrenic cinema.
- René Laloux

I never learned to animate. And I'm not trying to be cute, either. The minute you think you learned it, you're through. I've seen a lot of young animators coming up sensations. They get so good, so fast, so young, they never got any better, it's extraordinary to see. They never worked hard, so they don't get better. If you're an artist, you learn, you keep learning, you keep working.
- Ralph Bakshi

When you have a high budget, people are looking at you. Low budgets can be godsends for directors. Plus, with the number of people starving on this planet, it's just wrong to spend that kind of money on films. When you have no money, no one's looking at you, no one cares. No one cared when I was doing 'Fritz the Cat' (1972). Big budget films are filled with terror, filled with community consultations on all levels. But it's too much money for one man to handle and I'm not a great believer in collaboration. I believe in a directed film, and the vision of a director.
- Ralph Bakshi

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.
- David Cronenberg

I'm not a big fan of political correctness. It's very detrimental to art in general. An artist's responsibility is to be irresponsible. As soon as you start to think about social or political responsibility, you've amputated the best limbs you've got as an artist. You are plugging into a very restrictive system that is going to push and mold you, and is going to make your art totally useless and ineffective.
- David Cronenberg

When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'
- Quentin Tarantino

If you want to make a movie, make it. Don't wait for a grant, don't wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it.
- Quentin Tarantino

I've had people write that I've seen too many movies. In what other art form would being an expert be considered a negative? If I were a poet, would I be criticized for knowing too much about Sappho? Or Aristotle?
- Quentin Tarantino

This movie was never meant to be everything for everybody. And I don't mean that as a slam. I'm just saying I made this movie for myself and everybody else is invited.
- Quentin Tarantino

Just because I'm showing somebody being disemboweled doesn't mean I have to get heavy and put a message round it.
- George A. Romero

If I fail, they write me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.
- George A. Romero

Video technology puts filmmaking back in the hands of the people. That's how I learned how to make movies - making movies at home.
- Robert Rodriguez

"Nobody had his style. That's something I try to do in my films. You have your own kind of cryptic messages in there - cryptic things that most people wouldn't understand but are important to you. Things that kind of keep you going through the process."
- Tim Burton

I remember, I was at Cal Arts and I wasn't a good life-drawer; I struggled with that realistic style of drawing. And one day I was sitting in Farmer's Market sketching, and it was this weird, mind-blowing experience. I said, 'Goddamit, I don't care if I can't draw, I'm just gonna draw how I feel about it.' All of a sudden I had my own personal breakthrough, and then I could draw, and satisfied myself. I've had very few experiences like that, and I'll never forget it.
- Tim Burton

Every edit is a lie.
- Jean-Luc Godard

Up to now - since shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution - most movie makers have been assuming that they know how to make movies. Just like a bad writer doesn't ask himself if he's really capable of writing a novel - he thinks he knows. If movie makers were building airplanes, there would be an accident every time one took off. But in the movies, these accidents are called Oscars.
- Jean-Luc Godard

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
- Jean-Luc Godard

This is the world we're living in, people don't want to discuss things that are actually worth discussing.
- Terry Gilliam

I just don't understand people who would walk out on a movie.
- Takashi Miike

What I don't like are pompous, pretentious movies.
- Peter Jackson

To get an Oscar would be an incredible moment in my career, there is no doubt about that. But the 'Lord of the Rings' films are not made for Oscars, they are made for the audience.
- Peter Jackson

The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself. The worst type is dictated by demographics or what is hip or what kids are into. Kong isn't driven by that. No way would a studio think this is the year that people want to see a big gorilla movie. I've come to realize that, as much as anything, I am making this for the 9-year-old Peter.
- Peter Jackson

It's not a murder film and I wanted kids to be able to go and see it. Film is such a powerful medium. It's like a weapon and I think you have a duty to self-censor. There are some people who might enjoy watching a 14-year-old girl getting killed, a small minority maybe, but how could you live with yourself in providing that titillation? I wouldn't want the movie defined by that.
- Peter Jackson

I cut my finger. That's tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That's comedy.
- Mel Brooks

For me, film-making combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.
- Akira Kurosawa

I'm totally anti-commercialism. I would never do commercials where people hold the product by their head and tell you how great it is, I just wouldn't do that stuff. It's all inference ... The Levis commercials I did weren't really about jeans, the Nike commercials weren't about shoes. The 'Instant Karma' spot was some of the better stuff I got offered, and it was never about people going, "Buy this shoe, this shoe will change everything," because I think that's nonsense. Anybody looking outside themselves to make themselves whole is delusional and probably sick.
- David Fincher

I think that Fight Club is more than the sum of its parts, whereas Panic Room is the sum of its parts. I didn't look at Panic Room and think: Wow, this is gonna set the world on fire. These are footnote movies, guilty pleasure movies. Thrillers. Woman-trapped-in-a-house movies. They're not particularly important.
- David Fincher

It's better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you'll be too afraid to let things keep happening. Psychology destroys the mystery, this kind of magic quality. It can be reduced to certain neuroses or certain things, and since it is now named and defined, it's lost its mystery and the potential for a vast, infinite experience.
- David Lynch

In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what's so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can't, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say 'Did you understand that?' but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that's magical and that's the power that film has.
- David Lynch

I like to make films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost in another world. And film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream...allows you to dream in the dark. It's just a fantastic thing, to get lost inside the world of film.
- David Lynch

My mother refused to give me coloring books as a child. She probably saved me, Because when you think about it, what a coloring book does is completely kill creativity.
- David Lynch

Journal skin by *sergbel