Jacques Tourneur

“I look for very strong visual unity by using a type of framing and camera movement that is very simple. Everything must come from inside. It mustn’t be superficial. I hate weird camera angles and distorting lenses.”

Raoul Walsh

“There is probably no moment in picturemaking that is more acutely essential to a director’s success than the instant of his choice of story material. For the director, that is the moment of conception.”

Éric Rohmer

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

James Benning

“I have a very simple definition of an artist. The artist is someone who pays attention and reports back.”

Ben Russell

Chantal Akerman

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

Lisandro Alonso

“If tomorrow I have to quit filmmaking, I will. I’m not going to sell my house for a project, that’s for sure. If I have to go back and work on my family’s farm, fine. I don’t have any problem with it. But I would cry a lot.”

Kenneth Anger

[On unemployed filmmakers] "It seems much easier for these people to rent my films, look at them and make notes, than to give them a job."

Danièle Huillet

“It is the dividing lines that make one’s public. And the dividing lines end up in one way or another being lines which correspond to the lines of class, and class struggle.”

Jean-Marie Straub

“It is the dividing lines that make one’s public. And the dividing lines end up in one way or another being lines which correspond to the lines of class, and class struggle.”

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.”

Carlos Saura

“...my work has a coherence within its incoherence because I've decided to work with elements that I know to the core, to work with characters and settings I've lived with.”

Charlie Chaplin

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

Alfred Hitchcock

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

John Ford

“I hate the cinema. But I like making westerns.”

Howard Hawks

“I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! ”

Stan Brakhage

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

Jean Cocteau

“Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail. ”

Jacques Tati

“Like a dancer learns to dance ... a visual comic learns to use his legs.”

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.”