"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."

"Working with and knowing Jeff, he clearly mapped out a path that I could recognize and resonate with and follow, which was carrying a sense of justice and morality and responsibility in all of his projects."

"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."

"Star Wars, if you go back to its genesis in that very first film, was political. Politics has always played a part in it."

Curated by TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, with input and insight from TIFF programmers past and present, this series will showcase 50 landmark films from around the world that played a significant role in connecting with audiences, and reflect the story of TIFF.

"The difference between Cronos and The Devil's Backbone is I'm 36 and in Cronos I was 28, and I had now the enormous experience of eight years... but I feel I was better prepared to shoot that movie now. As a filmmaker, I had more tools."

"It's funny cause, y'know, I've never really considered myself a writer. I've considered myself a director who writes stuff for himself to do, and this was just the first one that I got a chance to do. I was very happy that the first film that I produced was one that I directed."

"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."

"For us it was really the teen comedy first being at the heart of it, and then just being like... what if we took all these characters from a team comedy and just start killing them?"

"Everything that was relevant when I was starting to become a filmmaker has completely changed, the landscape is completely different. We independent filmmakers get together and we say 'Have you been able to finance your next project? No, I haven't either.' That's where we're at. So there are new ways to get into filmmaking, even if it's not mainstream."

"If we hadn't had a really interesting beast, then you'd have had half a movie."

"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."

"To young people in this country, make stuff. Don't worry about the results."

"I talked to people who said afterwards that they would find themselves weeping, and they would look and there's, you know, somebody weeping beside them by they didn't even know why."

"We were filming and... so many sheep, like 2,000 sheep, seeing them in the streets or even crossing the highway."

"I decided that perhaps the best solution is to use real footage, since I was making this film 'underground' [without legal permits]... I believed that even if I had the capacity to recreate these scenes, I could never reach the power of the reality that was documented in the real footage."

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

"If you heard the original sound for those shots, you would hear nonstop honking. We pissed off so many people..."

"Adapted from the graphic novel by Chester Brown – which was a memoir in itself – and because I was a character in the graphic novel, I took a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't in the novel that I was privy to [...] it's really kind of a hybrid of reality, fiction, all muzzled up."

"Most films are not concerned with real people, in the strict sense of the notion of real people, they're concerned with movie characters. A lot of movies are movies about movies, and I don't make movies about movies."

"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..."

“Filmmaking is this ability to harness a story, with these incredible actors and locations, and to somehow find a way of bringing it all together.”

“Canada’s Top Ten celebrates the very best of Canadian cinema, showcasing the bold artistry of Canada’s most celebrated filmmakers and the fresh perspectives of emerging voices. The selection reflects Canada’s eclectic cultural landscape and a renaissance in risk-taking cinema.” –Anita Lee, TIFF Chief Programming Officer

"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."

"It's the difference between seeing the Mona Lisa in-person versus a lithograph."

"For a film about architecture, it just was sort of a no-brainer."

"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 thought 'we can turn a camera on these kids, in the farm that they live, and make a movie here.' It would have the kind of spirit of 'rough-and-tumble', unmanicured vibe of movies that I loved when I was growing up."

“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 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.’”

"I was saying to myself, I can't do another one of these unless I have an idea that's worthy of this kind of attention."

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

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

Set in a tight-knit community that seems to only experience two seasons, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s masterfully character-driven return to the screen probes into power dynamics and the darkest regions of the human soul.

A struggling Indigenous actor tries to rejuvenate his career by getting a sequel made to the beloved film Smoke Signals, in star and director Cody Lightning’s wildly funny debut mockumentary.

An evocative, drawn-from-life tale from directors Carol Kunnuk and Lucy Tulugarjuk about two siblings’ attempts to heal and overcome trauma during the pandemic.