Sacha Guitry

“Our wisdom comes from our experience, and our experience comes from our foolishness.”

Roberto Rossellini

“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”

Chris Marker

“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”

Jack Cardiff

“I was not a technical person - I was never a technical person. I have always liked the more artistic side of things and I did get a lot of inspiration and knowledge from studying painting - that was very important.”

Roberto Benigni

“Charlie Chaplin used his ass better than any other actor. In all his films his ass is practically the protagonist. For a comic, the ass has incredible importance.”

Abel Gance

“What is the cinema? A sixth art form!”

Wong Kar-wai

“Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it's the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.”

Michael Curtiz

“The only things you regret are the things you don't do.”

Hiroshi Shimizu

People like me and Ozu get films made by hard work, but Shimizu is a genius… —Kenji Mizoguchi

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.”

Claude Chabrol

“A woman confronting men is a proper subject, it is inexhaustible.”

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

Erich von Stroheim

“‎Lubitsch shows you the king on his throne, and then in the bedroom. I show you the king in his bedroom first so you know what kind of man he really is when you see him on the throne.”

James Whale

“Hollywood is just too marvelous. One feels the footprints of all the immortals are here, but has a terrible feeling that they are in sand and won’t last when civilization comes this way.”

Gregory La Cava

John Huston

“The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on.”

Terry Gilliam

“You get trapped by stories. Though I've got this reputation for being out of control, it's not true, it just happens to be a more interesting story than the truth.”

Charlie Chaplin

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

Wim Wenders

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

Shôhei Imamura

“I show true things using fictional techniques but maintaining truthfulness — that's where my approach differs from Ozu. He wanted to make film more aesthetic. I want to make it more real. He aspired toward a cinematic nirvana. When I was his assistant, I was very opposed to him, but now, whilst still not liking his films, I'm much more tolerant. As for me, I'd like to destroy this premise that cinema is fiction.”