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.”

Anton Corbijn

“I don't like a very fast film; I wanted a film where there would be time for someone to walk through a room because I like movement by people.”

Alexandru Tatos

Nae Caranfil

“A movie is not the product of a travel agency, it isn't financed by a program meant to draw people to the sea-side, it is a work of art and an act of culture. It has its own universe.”

Lucian Pintilie

“What is the survival strategy of a community in a state of perpetual catastrophe?...And when does making fun—the assumed irresponsibility, the dark humor that we, Romanians, are so proud of—stop being an impenetrable shield? This is the number one matter in all my movies.”

Philip Kaufman

“To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.”

Bernardo Bertolucci

“I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini

“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.”

Wim Wenders

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

Éric Rohmer

“I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak.”

Jacques Rivette

“What's important for me in a film is that it be alive, that it be imbued with presence, which is basically the same thing. And that this presence, inscribed within the film, possesses a form of magic. There's something profoundly mysterious in this.”

Philippe Garrel

“Cinema is Freud plus Lumière.”

Andrzej Żuławski

“To please the majority is the requirement of the Planet Cinema. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

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

Volker Schlöndorff

“As soon as I see “based upon a true story” at the beginning of a film, I always I think that it must be full of lies. The difference is not really about whether the events happened or not. It’s that in the fictions, reality is already put into a certain shape, and this structure has always appealed to me throughout my career. I found it easier to move from there into a movie rather than being confronted with the total complexity of reality.”

Louis Malle

“You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.”

Chantal Akerman

“When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.”