Sight & Sound Directors’ Top Ten Directors 2002

It's absolutely impossible to improvise. Making a movie is a mathematical operation. It is like sending a missile to the moon. It isn't improvised. It is too defined to be called improvisational, too mechanical. Art is a scientific operation, so I can say that what we usually call improvisation is in my case just having an ear and eye for things that sometimes occur during the time we are making the picture. - Federico Fellini (Directing the Film, 1976)

Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can't teach old fleas new dogs.

Fellini is essentially a small-town boy who’s never really come to Rome. He’s still dreaming about it. And we should all be very grateful for those dreams. In a way, he’s still standing outside looking in through the gates. The force of La Dolce Vita comes from its provincial innocence. It’s so totally invented.- Orson Welles (source)

The term 'giant' is used too often to describe artists. But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits. - Martin Scorsese

A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake.

Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings. - François Truffaut

Welles: Among those whom I would call ‘younger generation’ Kubrick appears to me to be a giant.
Interviewer: But, for example, The Killing was more or less a copy of The Ashphalt Jungle?
Welles: Yes, but The Killing was better. The problem of imitation leaves me indifferent, above all if the imitator succeeds in surpassing the model . . . What I see in him is a talent not possessed by the great directors of the generation immediately preceding his . . . Perhaps this is because his temperament comes closer to mine. - Orson Welles, from a 60's interview in Cahiers du Cinéma

One of his films... is equivalent to ten of somebody else's. Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountain top. You look up and wonder, "How could anyone have climbed that high?"- Martin Scorsese

An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

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

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.

My distinguishing talent is the ability to put people under the microscope, perhaps to go one or two layers farther down than some other directors.

The world's greatest film-maker. - François Truffaut