Douglas Sirk

“If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.”

Jean Genet

“To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”

Jean Cocteau

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

Michelangelo Antonioni

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

Charlie Chaplin

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

Christophe Honoré

“I’m not a child of the New Wave. I am a grandchild of the New Wave, so I can afford to be more arrogant, light-hearted and playful with the legacy.”

Jean-Luc Godard

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

Robert Bresson

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

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.”

Lars von Trier

“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

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.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful...it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.”

Federico Fellini

“What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one...”

Guy Maddin

“Whatever I do next, it'll be a horror film.”

Jacques Tati

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

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.”

Raúl Ruiz

“If you can make it complicated, why make it simple?”

Luchino Visconti

“I took a round trip around Hollywood because I think it frightened me. I didn’t want to get burned in that glare.”

Ágnes Hranitzky

Béla Tarr

“I think censorship is always there. Then it was the censorship of the state and now it's the censorship of the market.”