Frederick Wiseman

“There are lots of different ways to make film. I don’t believe there has to be any orthodox way to making movies, or any rules. It’s what works for the filmmaker, and, theoretically, the audience.”

Michel Gondry

“Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”

Christopher Nolan

“I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today's movies. They believe everything they're hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.”

Edward Yang

“I was the leader of the Taiwanese new wave. All these guys would just gather in my house, talking and laughing and drinking: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu Nien-jen — just about all of them. You could just push open the door. Everyone just wanted to do similar things. We weren’t allowed to, and no one was willing to give us any money to, but we shared all these idealistic thoughts.”

Atom Egoyan

“I think with all directors there are ideas that recur, at least for the ones that have creative control of their films.”

Yasujirô Ozu

“I formulated my own directing style in my own head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others… For me there was no such thing as a teacher. I have relied entirely on my own strength.”

Luis Buñuel

“I distrust reason and culture. In our thoughts there are images that appear suddenly, without us pondering them. In all my films, even the most conventional ones, is the tendency to irrational conduct that can not be explained logically.”

Park Chan-wook

“The audience seems hazy to me, shrouded in a veil through which I can't see.”

Susanne Bier

“I use it [hand-held-camera] in order to enable actors to move around freely because I want them to be truthful at all times and that means they should be able to move and not be bound by a fixed camera position. I think if it's used for style it's a mistake. It's there to do something very specific.”

Lynne Ramsay

“I've found that film-making's not just a job, it becomes part of your whole life.”

Nicholas Ray

“You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.”

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.”

Alfred Hitchcock

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

Douglas Sirk

“If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.”

Abbas Kiarostami

“But in all, I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. These are the things I don't like in the movies.”

Kathryn Bigelow

“I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what my aptitude is, and I really think it's to explore and push the medium. It's not about breaking gender roles or genre traditions.”

Agnès Varda

“I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.”

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.”

Fabián Bielinsky

Tsai Ming-liang

“The body always plays an important role in my films. You could say the body is the most beautiful thing we have or you could say it’s the ugliest thing we have. We can sell bodies, we can adore or worship bodies.”