Robert Bresson

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Lodge Kerrigan

"I have a long-standing interest in mental illness. I have friends who suffer from it. I think it’s a devastating illness, not only mentally, psychologically, emotionally, but also economically. I think it isolates people tremendously, and again, I want to try and engender some empathy for people who suffer."

Carlos Reygadas

“Theatre is interesting as a catharsis for actors because it's the only way you can be idiotic and get away with it. I really, really don't like theatre and I feel so far from it.”

Peter Tscherkassky

“I refer to my work as being cinematographic poetry and that’s why I love that layering, those superimpositions, right from the beginning of my filmic work.”

Kôji Wakamatsu

“I don’t think much of critics, so naturally they don’t think much of me either.”

Otto Mühl

“Art is an attack, an accusation. It is not my fault that my films are suffused with the stench of concentration camps.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

Kenneth Anger

[On unemployed filmmakers] "It seems much easier for these people to rent my films, look at them and make notes, than to give them a job."

Carl Theodor Dreyer

“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”

Ulrich Seidl

“If I manage to make people laugh with my films and their laughter gets stuck in their throat in the next moment, if I succeed in doing that, then that makes me happy.”

Ken Jacobs

“In real life, there’s no stories. Everything is unending, confusing. Nothing starts and concludes. There’s no beginning, middle and end in the actual experience of our lives, and we want this kind of neat little package, and we make them for ourselves in our stories.”

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

“German intellectuals treat me as if I were the enemy. They do not want to hear about what I believe lies at the heart of German identity.”

Peter Watkins

“I think that the main impact on my work, on the making of this film, came from the intensity of the similarity I felt to Edvard Munch as a man, as an artist, as someone who struggled throughout his life.”

Kurt Kren

Bruno Dumont

“I studied philosophy because it demands an intellectual outlook on the world [...] But I soon discovered that philosophy was too subjective: it lacks heart, it’s over-intellectual, and I found that it made me cut myself off from the everyday.”

Alan Clarke

“They're just actors. I much prefer the real thing!”

Jean Eustache

“The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can be.”

George Kuchar

“I get up late after editing ‘til dawn, soil some kitchenware, feed the cats and then go out for exercise so that my mid section doesn’t expand so much when I sit down at the editing bench once again.”

Lars von Trier

“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”