Theodoros Angelopoulos

“Prizes are prizes, but I still need to tell that story. And being simple is the hardest thing.”

Raúl Ruiz

“If you can make it complicated, why make it simple?”

Charlie Chaplin

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

Christoffer Boe

“I liked movies so much that they became an obsession. I am still trying to kick the habit.”

François Girard

Werner Schroeter

“I have no intention whatsoever of playing a leading part [in the New German Cinema], and submit to the expectations of producing Kulturscheisse [literally, Cultureshit], even if it may be true that I carry around with me and into my films the past of this Kulturscheisse.”

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.”

Julio Medem

“I want my own experience with each film to be new, so I try to run away fully from the film I made before and make something completely different.”

Nikita Mikhalkov

“Some people are of the opinion that an intellectual should hate power, drink like a cobbler and die of consumption under a fence. Then you are a real artist. But in that case what do we do with Lev Tolstoy?”

Francis Ford Coppola

“I'm in a unique situation. I'm like now an elderly retired guy who made a lot of money, and now I can just, instead of playing golf, I can make art films.”

Lisl Ponger

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.”

Lasse Hallström

“I was always attracted by the European way of life, but I am deeply Swedish.”

Fernando Meirelles

“We’re supposed to capture what’s in the air and give a form to it. The artist is like an antenna, always searching for new ideas and ways to express them.”

Jamie Travis

Jim Jarmusch

“I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are. ”

Andrew Dominik

Sam Mendes

“I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance.”

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.”

Jean Epstein

“Is whether they get married in the end really all you want to know? Look, really, there is no film that ends badly, and the audience enters into happiness at the hour appointed on the program.”