Famous Directors on Fellow Filmmakers: Quotes & Opinions
Explore a collection of candid quotes where legendary directors like Kubrick, Scorsese, and Welles share their opinions on other famous filmmakers and their work.
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Orson Welles on René Clair: “A true master: he invented his own Paris, which is better than merely reproducing it.”
Orson Welles on Federico Fellini: “His films are a small-town boy’s dream of a big city. He shows signs of a superlative artist with little to say.”
Orson Welles on Stanley Kubrick: “Of this younger generation, Kubrick seems to me a giant.”
Orson Welles on Jean-Luc Godard: “His gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker.”
Orson Welles on John Ford: “I prefer the old masters: John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.”
Orson Welles on Woody Allen: “I hate Woody Allen. Physically, I don’t like that kind of man, I never understood why. Have you met him? Oh, yes. I can barely stand to talk to him. He has the same disease as Charles Chaplin. This particular combination of arrogance and timidity annoys me profoundly… Like all people with timid personalities, their arrogance is limitless.”
Ingmar Bergman on Jean-Luc Godard: “I’ve never liked his films. I’ve always found them cinematically interesting and infinitely boring. Godard is a bore who made films for the critics.”
Ingmar Bergman on Orson Welles: “To me, he’s empty and uninteresting. He’s dead. Citizen Kane (1941), which I own a copy of, is a film beloved by all critics, but I find it a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The respect people have for the film is absolutely unbelievable.”
Ingmar Bergman on Michelangelo Antonioni: “Fellini, Kurosawa, and Buñuel move in the same field, as does Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but he expired, choked by his own boredom.”
Ingmar Bergman on Andrei Tarkovsky: “He is the most important director of all time.”
François Truffaut on Kenji Mizoguchi: “He is the greatest of Japanese filmmakers, undoubtedly one of the greatest filmmakers.”
François Truffaut on Michelangelo Antonioni: “Antonioni is the only important director about whom I have nothing good to say. He bores me; he’s so solemn and humorless.”
François Truffaut on Steven Spielberg: “I don’t know him personally and I don’t think his films are very good.”
François Truffaut on Robert Bresson: “Bresson is to French cinema as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is to German music and Fyodor Dostoevsky to Russian literature.”
François Truffaut on Orson Welles: “I owe him everything.”
Stanley Kubrick on other filmmakers: “I believe that Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica, and Federico Fellini are the only three filmmakers in the world who are not just artistic opportunists.”
Stanley Kubrick on Charles Chaplin: “Nobody could have made a film in a more prosaic way than Chaplin.”
Directors on Directors
Federico Fellini on Akira Kurosawa: “I think he’s the greatest example of all that a filmmaker should be. I feel a fraternal affinity with his way of telling a story.”
Clint Eastwood on Spike Lee: “A guy like him should shut his mouth.”
Alex Cox on Steven Spielberg: “Spielberg isn’t a filmmaker, he’s a confectioner.”
Jean Renoir on Orson Welles: “He is an animal made for the screen and the stage. When he’s behind the screens, it’s as if the rest of the world ceases to exist.”
Sergio Leone on Orson Welles: “He was a tough and temperamental man. He would break telephones and drink. But he could also be sensitive. In any case, I find him fascinating. I have infinite admiration for his directing.”
Michelangelo Antonioni on François Truffaut: “I think his films are like a river, lovely to see, to bathe in, extraordinarily refreshing and pleasant. Then the water flows and is gone and little of the pleasant sensation remains. I feel dirty again and need another bath. Truffaut leaves me indifferent.”
Roman Polanski on François Truffaut, Claude Lelouch, and Jean-Luc Godard: “People like Truffaut, Godard, and Lelouch are like children playing at being revolutionaries. I’ve already gone through that phase. I lived in a world where things were real.”
Francis Ford Coppola on Akira Kurosawa: “Most directors have one masterpiece they’re known for, or possibly two. Kurosawa has at least eight or nine. He is one of the greatest directors ever to work in cinema. His films helped me greatly at the beginning of my career.”
Francis Ford Coppola on Steven Spielberg: “He is unique. I feel that the types of films he loves are the same types of films that the general mass audience also loves.”
Francis Ford Coppola on Ingmar Bergman: “Of all of them, my favorite. He embodies passion, emotion, and warmth.”
Akira Kurosawa on Kenji Mizoguchi: “I have enormous respect for him. With his death, Japanese cinema lost one of its true creators.”
Akira Kurosawa on Satyajit Ray: “Never having seen a film by Satyajit Ray is like never having seen the sun or the moon.”
Werner Herzog on Jean-Luc Godard: “Someone like Godard is to me an intellectual fraud when compared to a good kung-fu film.”
Werner Herzog on Abel Ferrara: “No, no, I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is. But let him fight the windmills… I’ve never seen a film by him. Is he Italian? Is he French? Who is he?”
Martin Scorsese on Stanley Kubrick: “One of his films is equivalent to ten of someone else’s. Watching a Kubrick film is like looking up at the top of a mountain. You look up and admire how someone could have climbed so high.”
Martin Scorsese on Stanley Kubrick: “He’s truly a person with a powerful storytelling ability. A talent… a genius.”
Martin Scorsese on Akira Kurosawa: “The term ‘giant’ is used often to describe artists. But, in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term truly fits.”
Alfred Hitchcock on Michelangelo Antonioni and his film Blow-Up (1966): “That young Italian fellow is beginning to worry me.”
Alfred Hitchcock on Federico Fellini: “That Italian fellow is a hundred years ahead of us.”
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