British Director Quotes

Alfred Hitchcock

Laurence Olivier

Christopher Nolan

Peter Greenaway

Derek Jarman

Mike Leigh

Clive Barker

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

Alfred Hitchcock

The apparent simplicity of a model is due to a failure of imagination and limited data, unless the domain really is simple. If the world were really random, chemistry, cooking, and credit would not be possible, so our models cannot be figments of our imagination.

Peter Cheeseman

Dance teachers should be certified in this country.

In this Western culture we have all grown up as snow queens—straights, as well as white queers—Western culture is in love with its own (white) image.

I will, then, always love sin and the world until I truly sense that Christ is better.

I am that twentieth-century failure, a happy undersexed celibate.

But what if it turns out, as it just possibly might, that William Shakespeare of Stratford was not the author of the plays ascribed to him? There is a theory, advanced by reputable scholars, seriously and, in my opinion, plausibly, that Shakespeare merely lent his name as a cover for the literary activities of another person, perhaps the Earl of Oxford. If, by some terrible chance, this theory should be proved, then straightway Stratford's tourist business would dwindle. It would become just one more, and honestly not one in the first ten, of England's picturesque small towns.

When anything becomes the fashion, that's the time to put a bomb under it.

Joan Littlewood

The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness.

There are points where you worry that you might be putting too much in and alienating the audience. But, funnily enough, some of those fears aren't correct.

Christopher Nolan

Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline: at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety.

I am trisexual. The Army, the Navy, and the Household Cavalry.

Brian Desmond Hurst

I don't 'ave a future. Nobody 'as a future. The party's over. Take a look around you, man. It's all breakin' up.

To the playwright Arnold Wesker:

Shut up, Arnold, or I'll direct this play the way you wrote it!

Being a journalist, Hacker had no particular talent for reporting facts.

The slow-witted approach to the HIV epidemic was the result of a thousand years of Christian malpractice and the childlike approach of the church to sexuality. If any single man was responsible, it was Augustine of Hippo who murdered his way to sainthood spouting on about the sins located in his genitals.

The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything.

Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult.

Laurence Olivier

Although he never admitted himself to be an atheist as such, he was clearly and unarguably the most vividly elegant and eloquent skeptic of them all. I'm referring, of course, to the great Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Jonathan Miller

If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?

Peter Greenaway