History opens up new worlds to film-makers all the time.

Let film-makers take a call about what films they want to do.

Film-makers must decide what story to tell and how to tell it.

Film-makers are greedy people - we want good stories and good subjects.

My advice to young film-makers is this: don't follow trends, start them!

I'm inspired by film-makers such as Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Orson Welles.

When I began my career, I had films with the biggest film-makers in the country.

Of course, like all film-makers I've been mesmerised by cinema since I was a child.

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers.

What might the world look like if we took some chances on the film-makers we might be afraid of?

I love being around great actors and film-makers, and I try to hide the fact that I'm in awe of them.

I'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets.

India-Pakistan war and romance have always been sensitive issues for film-makers in both the countries.

If you think back to the great French directors it's difficult to think of British film-makers who are comparable.

I think it's important that we have a new batch of British film-makers that aren't doing the same old stuff. And that includes me.

I think I spent my entire childhood on film sets, surrounded by film-makers and actors and people with magnetic energies who make movies.

My father would schedule meetings over breakfast. Film-makers such as Rakesh Roshan and Prakash Jha have seen me as a child run around the house.

I can't stand it when writers moan about what film-makers might do or have done to their books. There's a very simple answer: don't take the money.

My films are very rooted in specific people's point of view. Some film-makers give a more global point of view, like God looking down at the characters.

It is a part of us, film-makers and audiences; what we can't say with dialogues, we say with a song. We tell stories through songs, look at our folk cultures.

In the Malayalam industry, artistes are expected to provide bulk dates to film-makers. But now that I'm working in different languages, that's a problem for me.

I don't like to rehearse, and the film-makers that I have been drawn to are interested in provoking something between people rather than nailing a scene in advance.

I saw experimental film-makers teaching in college. They did what they wanted and didn't worry about the market, but the circumstances ended up offering me other possibilities.

But I don't think as film-makers it is our responsibility that every time we make a film we should be saying something. If you are entertaining people, that's more than enough.

Mike Leigh and Ken Loach are the people I look up to. They are quality film-makers making interesting, controversial, ground-breaking movies with very little eye on the marketplace.

I think we're going to be very embarrassed in a few years when we see a lot more women film-makers. People will look back and ask, 'How did it take so long for you to figure this out?'

Cinema leaves a deep impact on the society. As creative people and entertainment film-makers, we have to be responsible at some point as we are also the conscious citizens of this country.

San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

At the time I left film school there wasn't a lot of hope for young film-makers. It was a calling card of film school to be quite slick and commercial, which might lead to getting some stuff on telly.

As film-makers, it is very important for us to find common ground between cultures, and maybe that's less the case for politicians who benefit more from finding the conflicts and differences between us.

So I feel a responsibility to help first-time film-makers in Brazil, but also to increase the dialogue between film cultures which are really wonderful and so much closer to us than what we do see on our screens.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

I always tell young film-makers, 'Find the song that only you can sing.' It doesn't just come to you. It's trial and error and disappointment before you find, slowly but surely, the confidence to express your film-making identity.

But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.

In the 1970s, a lot of critics didn't understand video. I got a lot of bad reviews. But film-makers didn't understand what we were doing, either. There were actual fistfights between film-makers and video-makers. I was witness to one.

I have said a lot of 'yeses' to lots of first-time film-makers. Lots, lots, lots. I admire them a lot, I respect them a lot. It is of greatest pride to be working with someone's first film - like being given a Nobel Prize or an Oscar.

Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots.

When I was in my 20s, I was out of control in terms of what I would do to defend my vision. There are black film-makers and storytellers who take a back seat to just get it done. It's good, but it's not right there. It's been compromised.

Film-makers should remain true to their principles and never compromise, there is a real revival in the British film industry but there is a danger that we will become colonial servants of Hollywood. We need to maintain our own integrity.

I remember in 1968 when we were in Cannes, in the festival, and we were supposed to be there 10 days, and the second day the festival collapsed because the French, you know, film-makers raised the red flag in the festival and ended the festival.

I go into meetings with some film-makers and they literally have nothing to say, they're almost bored by their own material. I'd rather work with people who are very passionate and very animated about what they want to do. People who just want to tell stories.

Wildlife film-makers I know tell me that the effort to portray what looks like an untouched ecosystem becomes harder every year. They have to choose their camera angles ever more carefully to exclude the evidence of destruction, travel further to find the Edens they depict.

My father, George, has also affected the choices in my life regarding films. I like films that take chances or say something different or experiment. Growing up with him, I was surrounded by different artists - not just actors or film-makers but cartoonists, poets, writers.

At least I know that one film-maker in my career has had the initiative to come to me and thought of me as being capable of doing interesting and complicated work, and so I have a new-found belief that other film-makers will see me in a different way, the way that Patty did.

I absolutely refuse to accept the fact that any country in the world goes into a kind of film-making crisis. What happens is they lose confidence, they lose focus and the young film-makers of any particular generation can very easily get lost in that mix. It's happened in Italy, happened in France, happened in the U.K. during my lifetime.

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