Terrence Malick

“[On Badlands (1973)] I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.”

Reha Erdem

Andrei Zvyagintsev

“As an art-house director I am supposed to hate mainstream films but I saw Peter Jackson's King Kong and liked it. I even cried when I was watching it although in my opinion this film has no artistic value at all.”

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.”

David Fincher

“I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.”

Sharunas Bartas

“Sadness is a much more stable emotion in people than happiness.”

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.”

Asghar Farhadi

Luc Dardenne

“Of course, we always hope our films will speak to people, disturb them, but we never hoped to change the world”

Jean-Pierre Dardenne

“The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.”

Stephen Hillenburg

Fyodor Khitruk

“When the wind blows straight to my chest, against me, I have plenty of energy. When the wind blows from my back, that energy disappears. During the period of tight censorship, we struggled with all our might to get our voice heard. But now that everything’s allowed, the strive has vanished. It’s like one French writer once said: an artist must always be a little hungry. Right?”

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.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

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

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.”

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. ”

Hayao Miyazaki

“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.”

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.”

Lars von Trier

“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”