Kelly Reichardt

“I like working in a really private way. I mean, we got as far as a cut of [Old Joy] without speaking to any kind of lawyer or anything. We got into Sundance before we thought we should form a company. Aside from a lot of sound work and stuff still to go, it was all very private, and that’s a dream for me.”

Jan Švankmajer

“I never call myself an animated filmmaker because I am interested not in animation techniques or creating a complete illusion, but in bringing life to everyday objects.”

Nina Menkes

“For me, cinema is sorcery, a creative way to interact with the world in order to rearrange perception and expand consciousness, both the viewers and my own.”

Jack Cardiff

“I was not a technical person - I was never a technical person. I have always liked the more artistic side of things and I did get a lot of inspiration and knowledge from studying painting - that was very important.”

Joachim Trier

“I think, to create reality in film, you still have to go through constructedness; you gotta go through a process of artifice anyways. I'm not one of those people who thinks, "Oh, the real person will seem real on the screen;" to create something that is seemingly real takes a lot of work. But having said that, I try to structure the scenes quite tightly, but then within that, leave them some space to go unexpected places.”

Sebastián Silva

Leo McCarey

“I love when people laugh. I love when they cry, I like a story to say something, and I hope the audience feels happier leaving the theater than when it came in.”

Fatih Akin

“The funnier it is in the beginning of a story, the more dramatic it can become. Because when an audience is laughing, that's opening their souls somehow, and when you have an audience with an open soul, it's much better to hit them with a knife.”

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.”

Hirokazu Kore-eda

“I wanted to create a big lie, meaning the opposite of the documentary-style, naturalist, contemporary films I've been doing.... So far I've tried to use naturalism to search for reality, but now I will try total fiction to search for that reality. ”

Jean Eustache

“The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can be.”

Jim Jarmusch

“I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are. ”

Ernst Lubitsch

“There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.”

Billy Wilder

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.”

Thomas Vinterberg

“The Dogma Manifesto was a wonderful opportunity to be a team, to unite the country’s filmmakers. But we’ve all sought out other paths, we distanced ourselves from a movement that was becoming a brand, and would have ended up limiting our creativity.”

Corneliu Porumboiu

“I believe that the cinema shouldn’t only offer information; it can create a world through time and movement.”

Arnaud Desplechin

“Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare...”

Claire Denis

“Even if it's the dream of a voyage, I think it was very important for me that the film offer the two sides of the globe.”

Susanne Bier

“I use it [hand-held-camera] in order to enable actors to move around freely because I want them to be truthful at all times and that means they should be able to move and not be bound by a fixed camera position. I think if it's used for style it's a mistake. It's there to do something very specific.”

Anders Thomas Jensen