"Oh, Canada is this magical land of illegal whiskey and great animation."

“Kojima’s style breaks the barrier between cinema and games. In a way he’s a film director, but he uses video games to tell the story.” 

“He keeps the touch light — the famous Lubitsch Touch. It's light, but psychologically potent.”

"Something consciously I was trying to do was to honour the sense of space, but also the sense of time. Allowing the scenes to flow in which the camera is more like a ghost that comes from the future and is in that place and is just witnessing." —Alfonso Cuarón

“In this film, we’re not seeking agreement… we’re seeking engagement – allow yourself to open up and encounter other ideas. That’s the goal.”

Oscar-winning director and TIFF '23 Platform Jury member, Barry Jenkins (If Beale Street Could Talk, The Underground Railroad, Medicine for Melancholy), makes his return to TIFF to unpack his Academy Award-winning sophomore feature, Moonlight. Examining the Black filmography and the legendary auteurs that influenced his work, Jenkins details his Miami origins and the enduring legacy of his influential film.

“Dumb Money is about the little guy. It’s a David and Goliath story.” 

"There's still so much potential for different kinds of queer stories on screen in genres we haven't seen before with elements we haven't seen before."

"There's still so much potential for different kinds of queer stories on screen in genres we haven't seen before, with elements we haven't seen before, like lots of blood, or stunts, or whatever it is. That's the genre I wanted to put queer characters in."

“Seeing women of colour in genre filmmaking… there’s just a lot of stories that we have to tell.”

"Any person has multiple identities, and how you meet that person, when you meet that person, colours how you see them and I feel that stories are the same."

"For me, it's almost like this story could happen in a contemporary Poland, which is very bad in the way that you watch a film that takes place 100 years ago and you feel that not much has changed."

“I had just done Cronos and Mimic, and Mimic had almost destroyed me… I couldn’t quite finance a new movie, and a few years earlier, Pedro had seen Cronos in the Miami Film Festival and he said ‘Look, if you ever want to shoot a movie in Spain, call me and my brother.’”

"The film that I made previously, called Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was essentially from a first person perspective... I used, I think, three or four shots from that film as a proof of concept when trying to show people how images look and how the camera would be moving..."

“[It] refers to the wrinkle that you have in between your eyebrows … so if you do feature films you have a deep Triangle of Sadness, as you see I have.”

“My film’s executive produced by Taika Waititi (Reservation Dogs, Boy) and he told me to, just throw away your idea of who these characters are. Letting go and letting these kids be.”

"I just couldn't quite believe how English and wacky it is. I couldn't believe it was based on a real story." 

"Sometimes you have to be a high-flying bitch."

"I think he can relax me a little, because of the way he is and maybe I can give him some energy in the way I am. I don't know, it somehow just works."

“We’re now reaching the time where people who are, you know, reaching their prominence in film, in the film industry, are people who grew up watching anime.”

Director James Gray breaks down how Joaquin Phoenix is able to naturally depict internal conflict.

“We don’t need to see the shark to be terrified of it.”

“I don’t think, without her films, that I would be the same man at all or the same filmmaker… or a filmmaker.”

"You should think of the word 'depressed' as 'deep rest'. Your body needs to be depressed. It needs deep rest from the character that you've been trying to play."

“I had the feeling I wanted to make something slower… that had documentary aspects to it. Something grittier. Less pure than what I was seeing in other films of the crime genre.” 

“It puts you in a place and in a mood, and shows you a whole new side of the ’20s that maybe — or maybe didn't — exist.” 

"Recent monster movies are full of images of big cities being destroyed. In the old monster movies, it was much scarier to have them land in ordinary fishing villages. It's much more frightening to have your house destroyed than a big city."

"What the film did successfully was it showcased the talent of a young Kôji Yakusho. Before then, he was often cast as a nice guy or a good citizen... I think the role [in Cure] helped shift the way people saw him as an actor."

"The more serious and earnest I become, the more I realize that my films may only be understood by a certain type of person."

“There’s a disconnect between this rosy image of and the reality of a country in turmoil.” 

I know future me is going to watch it and he's going to be like "what the f*ck, who is this?" but it's going to be like emotional. I know ten years from now, who knows where the hell I would be and how much I would have changed the world. "

“One of the things I love about cinema is that it helps you articulate feelings and sensations. Words don’t express the whole gamut of what you want to do.”

“If I’m being truthful, filmmaking is kind of like a coward’s way out for me. I’m able to express all the things I can’t express to my family, or I’m too shy to express to my family. It’s all there when you watch my film.”

"[Martin Scorsese] pushes the conventions of filmmaking. He's an exciting filmmaker, who even though he returns to the same themes, he always does it in a different way." —Alicia Malone

“I struggle at times, because I worry the films are getting very dark and bleak, so I try and temper that with as much humour as possible, and just gags – cramming as many visual gags in there as possible to balance out that darkness.”

"I felt if I don't do it now, I'll never do it."