Spike Lee

“I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.”

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

“In my films the landscapes connect the characters to a sense of something cosmic. I try to recapture those moments in life where you suddenly feel that connection to a wider universe.”

Lynne Ramsay

“I've found that film-making's not just a job, it becomes part of your whole life.”

John Cassavetes

“The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.”

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.”

Aki Kaurismäki

“Cinema is dead. It died 1962, I think it was in October!”

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”

Elem Klimov

“I’ve lost interest in making films. Everything that was possible I felt I had already done. ”

Peter Greenaway

“I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.”

Vincent Gallo

“I constantly try to reinvent my sensibilities and my ideas. I enjoy some of the satisfaction that I get when I feel good about what I've done. But the process is quite lonely and quite painful.”

Roman Polanski

“You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.”

John Cameron Mitchell

“It’s ultimately a boring thing, your sexuality – inherently neutral and kind of dull. It’s what you do with it that’s interesting.”

Horațiu Mălăele

“Making movies is like having babies with blow-up dolls.”

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.”

Alexandru Solomon

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.”

Yuriy Norshteyn

“Never allow oneself to remain the same – like a river, always renew yourself. I’m always wondering about the paths that would open animation to become a real dramatic art.”

Wes Anderson

“I know that feeling of looking back and thinking, that part I'd like to fix. So I obsessively try not to compromise.”

Woody Allen

“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”

Charlie Chaplin

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