Shûji Terayama

“Lying down in the attic, where angry waves sound very close, I make poetry my power.”

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.”

Nagisa Ôshima

“My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it.”

Brian De Palma

“So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point. ”

Toshio Matsumoto

“What you think is reality is false, and what you think is fiction is real.”

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.”

Guy Debord

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

André Forcier

Chantal Akerman

“When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.”

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 Rouch

“I don’t think there’s any border between science and art. All the fiction films I have made were always on the same subject,—a discovery of the “Other,” an exploration of difference.”

Joyce Wieland

“I think of Canada as female.”

Mike Leigh

“The whole thing about making films in an organic film location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across”

Gilles Carle

“Don’t go thinking that censorship is less of an issue when it ceases to be abusive. In itself, censorship is an abuse.”

Glauber Rocha

“Cinema Novo stood with the Brazilian utopia. If it is ugly, irregular, dirty, confusing and chaotic, it is also beautiful, disharmonic, luminous and revolutionary.”

Bruce Baillie

“Being an artist in a cultural Stone Age, I have no income.”

Maurice Pialat

“What I try to do, with the actors' consent, is to create something by beginning with a set situation that we can deviate from in the course of the shoot. ”

Hans Richter

“Rhythm cannot be explained completely by thought nor can thought be put in terms of rhythm, or converted or reproduced. They both find their connection and identity in common and universal human life, the life principle, from which they spring and upon which they can build further.”

Harmony Korine

“What I remember myself from films, and what I love about films, is specific scenes and characters.”

Raymond Depardon

“Not for money but for the freedom.”