“In Bergman’s world I represented a sort of intellectual, skeptical, ironic person, rather cold and frustrated. When I went abroad and made films in Italy and other places, I was used in different ways. I was rather often cast as crazy people, maniacs. It was very good for me and it was fun because it is nice to play crazy people if you are not in reality, and I think perhaps that changed how Ingmar saw me. Suddenly I was on the more magical side of his world, playing the people with fantasies, variety, the artists.”

— Erland Josephson (June 15, 1923 –- February 25, 2012)

“Rossellini stands out from the rest of the so-called neorealists for his eye, his intervention as a strong and compassionate witness who knew how to photograph the air around things, and for his disregard of cinema as a spectacle. I took part as a spectator in Paisan and Rome, Open City and I may have learnt my way of approaching cinema from Rossellini, who worked in the most incredible confusion: expiring bills, romantic complications, conflicts, the war. I remember in Naples, during the shooting of Paisan, in the middle of the street, with the allies’ tanks parading behind our backs, and there he was, with his beret and the megaphone: the casualness of a god who’s creating an earthquake only to be able to photograph it. This is the true lesson that neorealism taught me.” — Federico Fellini

“All of us will always owe him everything.”

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they’re whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they’ve got. I can’t possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”

“Hitchcock has never won an Oscar, although he is the only living filmmaker whose films, when they are reissued twenty years after their first appearance, are as strong at the box office as new films. His last film, The Birds, is admittedly not perfect. Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren are imperfectly matched, and the sentimental story (as almost always, husband hunting) suffers from it. But what an injustice there is in the generally bad reception. I am so disappointed that no critic admired the basic premise of the film: “Birds attack people.” I am convinced that cinema was invented so that such a film could be made. Everyday birds — sparrows, seagulls, crows — take to attacking ordinary people, the inhabitants of a seacoast village. This is an artist’s dream; to carry it off requires a lot of art, and you need to be the greatest technician in the world.” – Francois Truffaut

“It is in the quality of his meditation on history that Visconti distinguishes himself from all other film-makers, past or present. There have been great film-makers who have occasionally delved into the past for one reason or another… But none of these, not even Eisenstein, applies to his re-creation of the past a serious and thought through theory of history… Perhaps it is because we  no longer expect movie-makers to be profound thinkers that Visconti’s greatness is no longer appreciated as it should be.” – Nowell-Smith