François Truffaut

“I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.”

Darren Aronofsky

“To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don't think is a good ride.”

Sydney Pollack

“I don't value a film I've enjoyed making. If it's good, it's damned hard work.”

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.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

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

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.”

Park Chan-wook

“The audience seems hazy to me, shrouded in a veil through which I can't see.”

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.”

Bong Joon-ho

“Human beings basically express their feelings in the same way. They feel the same feelings. If you look at two foreigners talking to each other, you soon can see if they are fighting, or are in love.”

Alfred Hitchcock

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

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.”

Gus Van Sant

“I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.”

Francis Ford Coppola

“I'm in a unique situation. I'm like now an elderly retired guy who made a lot of money, and now I can just, instead of playing golf, I can make art films.”

Clint Eastwood

“...in America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience. Not to say that it's all bad, but it leaves a lot of the rest of us out of it. To me cinema can be a much more friendly world if there's a lot of things to choose from.”

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.”

Andrew Dominik

François Ozon

“I think cinema has to deal with desire. In the cinema, you are with a big screen, it is dark, and you watch some images, like a fantasy, so I think it is important for you to feel desire for what you see.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ”

Paul Cox

“If you want to do anything seriously, do it as a hobby. I've always believed this. As soon as it becomes a profession, a degree of compromise comes in. . Photography was my profession; cinematography my hobby. It was a safe start.”