What These 10 Filmmakers Love About Movies

Have you ever wondered what some of the greatest filmmakers and performers in the world love about movies? A new book presented by Little White Lies magazine answers just that. Pulling together responses from 50 filmmakers and actors—and also featuring some gorgeous illustrations to boot—What I Love About Movies: An Illustrated Compendium is an essential volume for all those cinephiles out there wondering about what inspires the people that inspire them.

1. Quentin Tarantino

Getty Images

“When I kind of enjoy movies the most now, is when I get that voracious aspect of going through a career or a genre or a country’s cinema. This grand film study that goes on my whole life.”

2. Francis Ford Coppola

Getty Images

“I often think that there’s only been a hundred years of cinema and yet the amount of masterpieces that have been done are amazing. I can only conclude that the human race was waiting for cinema so they could pour this out because how else could there have been so many great films even in the first 30 years? So it’s sort of a divine collection of all human aspiration and art forms.”

3. Alexander Payne

Getty Images

“Watching a movie transports you to a different time and place and story. It allows us to live vicariously, and we all want to live vicariously. We want to live many lives. We want to roll it all into one life. And if you can spy on someone else’s life in a grandly entertaining way in two hours, what’s better? We’re so lucky to have lived in an era where cinema even exists. All those poor sons of bitches, billions of them, who lived and died and never got to see a movie. Don’t that just make you wanna cry?”

4. Richard Linklater

Getty Images

“They’re a more selective, more attuned and more neatly edited version of life itself. It’s improved life.”

5. Danny Boyle

Getty Images

“If somebody from another planet asked us, ‘What do you think psychologically about people who go and sit with a load of strangers in a dark room and watch 40-foot high versions of themselves kissing and shagging and hurting each other,’ you’d think, ‘That’s insane. They’re mad those people, they’re absolutely mad.’ And I love the way we play out madness on it, really.”

6. Steve McQueen

Getty Images

“I’ve been in cinemas and I’ve been sitting down and I’ve looked at things in front of me and been totally moved. If you can be moved by a movie, if a movie stirs you, gives you goose pimples, makes you feel different when you walk outside onto the street and see daylight, that’s something unique.”

7. Tim Burton

Getty Images

“I’ve always thought films, like fairy tales, explore concepts such as life and death in a safe way. They help you learn how to cope and find your place in the world.”

8. Terry Gilliam

Getty Images

“Very little, these days … I find that movies are becoming repetitive now, the big ones I’m talking about, not the small independent ones where there’s still life and hope.”

9. Claire Denis

Getty Images

“It’s an experience that I cannot define or compare to anything else.”

10. Steven Soderbergh

Getty Images

“In the summer of 1975, I was 12 and I saw Jaws. It freaked me out so completely it was almost like a civil claims court: ‘I need to know more about who did this to me.’ A year later I got my hands on a camera. And the question was then, ‘Well, can I do this to people?’” 

For many more quotes and analysis about what many more directors, actors, and actresses love about movies, check out What I Love About Movies: An Illustrated Compendium, presented by Little White Lies magazine and edited by David Jenkins and Adam Woodward, out now from Opus Books.