Arnaud Desplechin

“Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare...”

Andrei Tarkovsky

“Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”

François Ozon

“I think cinema has to deal with desire. In the cinema, you are with a big screen, it is dark, and you watch some images, like a fantasy, so I think it is important for you to feel desire for what you see.”

Alain Resnais

“I'm always in search of special nonrealistic language that has musicality. ”

Todd Solondz

“Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can’t celebrate humanity but I’m not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.”

Ang Lee

“Things are being simplified a lot for us lately. I think people are hungry for something that shows more respect for the complexity of life, the depth, the grey areas.”

Ursula Meier

Claire Denis

“Even if it's the dream of a voyage, I think it was very important for me that the film offer the two sides of the globe.”

Oliver Stone

“I consider my films first and foremost to be dramas about individuals in personal struggles and I consider myself to be a dramatist before I am a political filmmaker.”

David Mamet

“A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue. ”

Mathieu Kassovitz

“I have a hard enough time speaking for myself - I don't pretend I can be a spokesman for anybody. I have no interest in playing that role.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

“I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.”

Charlie Chaplin

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

Woody Allen

“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”

Robert Altman

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Aki Kaurismäki

“Cinema is dead. It died 1962, I think it was in October!”

Olivier Assayas

“With Irma Vep, all of a sudden I decided that it was okay to mix genre, to mix cultures, and that movies sometimes could be experiments, that within the format of modern cinema, within the format of narrative, you could experiment by mixing elements.”

Jean Renoir

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.”

Billy Wilder

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.”

Sofia Coppola

“Perhaps it makes sense that a woman whose earliest memory was on the set of Apocalypse Now would grow up to direct a dark fable about five adolescent girls who unapologetically and unceremoniously kill themselves...”