Hong Sang-soo

“When I finish a film, I feel like I have overcome a certain hurdle. It's really good for me as a human being, and I hope that for some people, my films will do the same thing.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

“I'll rebel against powers and principalities, all the time. Always, I will.”

Joachim Trier

“I think, to create reality in film, you still have to go through constructedness; you gotta go through a process of artifice anyways. I'm not one of those people who thinks, "Oh, the real person will seem real on the screen;" to create something that is seemingly real takes a lot of work. But having said that, I try to structure the scenes quite tightly, but then within that, leave them some space to go unexpected places.”

Andrea Arnold

“Dramatically, I like darkness, I like conflict - but I don't see the world as defined by them. And why would I pretend to? That's not who I am.”

David Cronenberg

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their 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.”

David Lynch

“I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead.”

Roman Polanski

“You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.”

Luchino Visconti

“I took a round trip around Hollywood because I think it frightened me. I didn’t want to get burned in that glare.”

Fatih Akin

“The funnier it is in the beginning of a story, the more dramatic it can become. Because when an audience is laughing, that's opening their souls somehow, and when you have an audience with an open soul, it's much better to hit them with a knife.”

Fritz Lang

“I should say that I was a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears...to my constant regret.”

Jean Vigo

[on his film, À propos de Nice] “In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial. The last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

“Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”

Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”

Federico Fellini

“What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one...”

Akira Kurosawa

“Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied...that's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.”

Wim Wenders

“Any movie that has that spirit and says things can be changed is worth making. ”

Béla Tarr

“I think censorship is always there. Then it was the censorship of the state and now it's the censorship of the market.”

Athina Rachel Tsangari

Lech Majewski

“Always what I’m trying to do with cinema is trying to create a sense of painting. That’s my lost world of painting that I’m accessing by film.”