Make subtlety obvious.

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.

Film’s thought of as a director’s medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot-the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

I, you know, am all over the place — every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent. I could not make, like Hitchcock did, one Hitchcock picture after another. … I wanted to do a Hitchcock picture, so I did `Witness for the Prosecution,’ then I was bored with it, so I moved on.

When Chaplin found a voice to say what was on his mind, he was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth.