I don’t know anything about the way a film is born, nothing about the manner of it, the lying-in, the ‘big bang’, the first three minutes. Whether the images in those first three minutes are born out of their author’s deep desire, or if—in an ontological sense—they merely are what they are. I wake up one morning with my head full of images. I don’t know where they come from, or how or why. They recur in the following days and months; I can’t do anything about them, and I do nothing to drive them away. I’m happy to contemplate them and I make notes in my mind, which I write down in a book some time.

—Michelangelo Antonioni

Like all art forms, film is a media as powerful as weapons of mass destruction; the only difference is that war destroys and film inspires.

—Nicolas Winding Refn