Jean Vigo

[on his film, Nizza] “In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial. The last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution.”

Fernando Di Leo

Paul Bartel

Robert Altman

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Michael Powell

“I’m not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through the cinema...”

Timothy Carey

“I don’t care about anything, about the cinema. I don’t like it. Bunch of lonely people. Going in. Looking up. Forget about it.”

Serge Gainsbourg

“Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.”

Dušan Makavejev

“You just see so many movies that at some point it becomes part of your life...Movies always follow us as reference material or as some kind of dreamlike material for dealing with things we don't understand in our lives. Movies give us solutions, or provide a whispering commentary on what is happening around us.”

Mike Kuchar

“When I was a kid, I’d look at the screen and see all those adults in turbulent dramas, I couldn’t wait to be an adult.”

Don Siegel

“Most of my pictures, I’m sorry to say, are about nothing. Because I’m a whore. I work for money. It’s the American way.”

Dino Risi

“I feel like an abusive tenant. I don’t have friends anymore. They were all younger than me and they died before me, Gassman, Fellini, Zapponi, Lapegna, Tognazzi, Mastroianni, Sordi, Manfredi. I don’t have nobody to talk with. The language used by young people today is unbearable. My nephews talk only about "dotcoms” and “www”. I don’t even have that thing, how’s it called, the fax. I still post my letters in the mailbox.”

Pietro Germi

Fritz Lang

“I should say that I was a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears...to my constant regret.”

Tex Avery

“Let’s make some funny pictures.”

Tommy Wiseau

“As a director, I have to feel realism from actors, and they can’t be plastic. The words for me are secondary, but the chemistry between the actors is most important.”

Nicholas Ray

“You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.”

Josef von Sternberg

“I care nothing about the story, only how it is photographed and presented.”

Derek Jarman

“I wouldn’t wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem you could be unaware of it.”

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.”

Catherine Breillat

“When I shoot a film, I always project myself into one of the characters, at once into either a man or a woman...”