Bruno Dumont

“I studied philosophy because it demands an intellectual outlook on the world [...] But I soon discovered that philosophy was too subjective: it lacks heart, it’s over-intellectual, and I found that it made me cut myself off from the everyday.”

Ben Rivers

Léos Carax

“I perceive 'Pierre' (Pola X) in the same way that I perceive my own life: I understand both 'poorly' but I’m obliged to explore them. That’s what a project is: a heavy question mark. You’re the dot under that mark and you mustn’t let it crush you.”

Jean-Pierre Gorin

“You need to reach the point where you are not speaking as an ego, but where something is speaking through you. This is a process of complete dissolution of the ego. Something is speaking through me which is history, not only my own history, but centuries of history.”

Cristi Puiu

“I’m not like other directors who don’t allow their actors to watch. I let them have one scene their way, one for me, then allow them to compare. I don’t choose actors for their appearance or ability in dancing or whatever, but because of their intelligence.”

Stan Brakhage

“There are a lot of movies made for nobody.”

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.”

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.”

Joachim Trier

“I think, to create reality in film, you still have to go through constructedness; you gotta go through a process of artifice anyways. I'm not one of those people who thinks, "Oh, the real person will seem real on the screen;" to create something that is seemingly real takes a lot of work. But having said that, I try to structure the scenes quite tightly, but then within that, leave them some space to go unexpected places.”

Roy Andersson

“I felt that film-making generally didn't reach the level you could find in painting or literature or music. It was for one-time use only, and more and more, the movies were losing their visual power - they were concentrating on the plot only. That's why I started wanting to be a film director myself. It wasn't only the plot that was interesting; it was the touch, the feeling, something visually rich.”

Robert Bresson

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Pedro Costa

“If you don't risk yourself and the people with whom you're working in almost every shot you make, it's not good, it's useless, it's just another film.”

Alain Resnais

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

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.”

Hou Hsiao-hsien

“The main thing is for the actors to forget the camera. They have to act as if they are working in a documentary.”

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.”

Éric Rohmer

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

Michelangelo Antonioni

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

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.”

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.”