My Favorite Directors

"I always like to think of the audience when I am directing. Because I am the audience."

"It's hard work making movies. It's like being a doctor:you work long hours, very hard hours, and it's emotional, tense work. If you don't really love it, then it ain't worth it."

"The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it."

"I don't make crappy movies. I spend two or three years making a film. I don't take myself seriously, but I take my movies very seriously"

"All my movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds."

" Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I'm lucky enough to be in the position where I don't make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it."

" I think that films like 'Godzilla' are like the fantasy punishment for what we've done. The real punishment will happen if we keep going this route. Films like this remind us not to get too complacent - and that we should really try and fix some of these things that we've done before it's too late."

"If you want to get into anime, my best advice to you as a creator is to please have diverse interests in things besides animation. Look outward, first of all. Most anime makers are basically autistic. They have to try and reach out, and truly communicate with others. I would guess that the greatest thing anime has ever achieved is the fact that we're holding a dialogue right here and now."

"My process is thinking... thinking... and thinking. If you have a better way, please let me know."

"Do whatever the fuck you want, even if it's wrong, and then tell about it with honesty. That is filmmaking to me...Success is fucking up on your own terms."

"In France, I'm an auteur; in Germany, a filmmaker; in Britain; a genre film director; and, in the USA, a bum."

"Monsters are born too tall, too strong, too heavy, that is their tragedy."

"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."

"I think people remember pictures not dialogue. That's why I like pictures."

"A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper."

"Movies are a magician's forge, they allow you to build a story with your hands--at least, that's what it means to me. What attracts me in movies is to be presented with a problem and be able to solve it. Nothing else; just to create an illusion, an effect, with almost nothing."

"I've always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know."

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

"I just love action movies. For me, the most universal language and the purest syntax of cinema is in the action movies"

"You can't be a cartoonist, I don't care what kind of cartoonist you are, without having passed through this thing of loving fantasy."