Sogo Ishii

“My first four films were made between 1980 and 1983. I call them my 'punk movies'. These films are liked by a lot of people and my public image is based on these films, so that's why I'm seen as the 'punk director'.”

Koji Yamamura

Adoor Gopalakrishnan

“Many amongst us are living in an illusory world. They claim to be living in a fast world. But where is speed in our life? It is there only on TV or in MTV where images flicker fast and faster. In a place where the electrical power supply is frequently interrupted, how can life be fast? This speed we are talking about is totally artificial, like our popular heroes and villains, their costumes and vocations.”

Slobodan Šijan

René Laloux

“What suggests, is superior to what shows. Movies today show more and more. It’s paranoid dictator cinema.”

Juraj Herz

“I wasn’t in the group of "New Wave” directors simply because they didn’t accept me among them.”

Yuri Ilyenko

Guy Maddin

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

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.”

Charlie Chaplin

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

Elem Klimov

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

Marcell Jankovics

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.”

Kon Ichikawa

“I don't have any unifying theme - I just make any picture I like or that my company tells me to do.”

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.”

Bryan Forbes

“I was a writer who became an actor who became a screenwriter who became a director.”

Raúl Ruiz

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

Federico Fellini

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

Masaki Kobayashi

“In any era, I am critical of authoritarian power.”

Robert Gardner