Poll: When 20 legendary directors talk about film-making ...

Results of 2,677 votes:

1. 1.
   

   Stanley Kubrick

    

   "The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it's simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to disc…
2. 2.
   

   Ingmar Bergman

    

   "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."
3. 3.
   

   Alfred Hitchcock

    

   "Drama is life with the dull bits left out."
4. 4.
   

   Andrei Tarkovsky

    

   "The director's task is to recreate life, its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen, even if not everyone finds tha…
5. 5.
   

   Akira Kurosawa

    

   "With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can't possibly ma…
6. 6.
   

   Orson Welles

    

   "A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."
7. 7.
   

   Charles Chaplin

    

   "I don't believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career"
8. 8.
   

   John Cassavetes

    

   "Everything is for sale. Emotions are sold. Sex is sold. Everything is sex. Cars, women, clothes, your face, your hands, your shoes! Look at the ads, at television. My emotions aren't for sale. M…
9. 9.
   

   Frank Capra

    

   "My advice to young filmmakers is this: Don't follow trends. Start them!"
10. 10.
    

    Federico Fellini

     

    "Our dreams are our real life. My fantasies and obsessions are not only my reality, but the stuff of which my films are made."
11. 11.
    

    François Truffaut

     

    "I make films that I would like to have seen when I was a young man."
12. 12.
    

    Luis Buñuel

     

    (when asked on why he made movies) "To show that this is not the best of all possible worlds."
13. 13.
    

    Billy Wilder

     

    "I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut."
14. 14.
    

    Sidney Lumet

     

    "While the goal of all movies is to entertain, the kind of film is which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience. It stimul…
15. 15.
    

    D.W. Griffith

     

    "A film without a message is just a waste of time."
16. 16.
    

    Jean Renoir

     

    "A director only makes one film in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again."
17. 17.
    

    William Wyler

     

    "It's 80% script and 20% you get great actors. There's nothing else to it."
18. 18.
    

    John Ford

     

    "There are commercial rules that it is necessary to obey. In our profession, an artistic failure is nothing; a commercial failure is a sentence. The secret is to make films that please the public…
19. 19.
    

    David Lean

     

    "Film is a dramatized reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real... an audience should not be conscious of technique."
20. 20.
    

    John Huston

     

    "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 mov…