Sharunas Bartas

“Sadness is a much more stable emotion in people than happiness.”

Nicolas Winding Refn

“Art is an act of violence.”

Alan Clarke

“They're just actors. I much prefer the real thing!”

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.”

Bruno Dumont

“I studied philosophy because it demands an intellectual outlook on the world [...] But I soon discovered that philosophy was too subjective: it lacks heart, it’s over-intellectual, and I found that it made me cut myself off from the everyday.”

Andrzej Żuławski

“To please the majority is the requirement of the Planet Cinema. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini

“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.”

Frederick Wiseman

“There are lots of different ways to make film. I don’t believe there has to be any orthodox way to making movies, or any rules. It’s what works for the filmmaker, and, theoretically, the audience.”

Věra Chytilová

“I have no desire to cuddle my audience.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

“Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”

Seijun Suzuki

“I was never rebellious, I was just mischievous!”

Carl Theodor Dreyer

“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”

Miklós Jancsó

“An artist should be able to create his own autonomous world, but making a film depends on so many extraneous factors that I don’t really think it’s an authentic form of art.”

Nagisa Ôshima

“My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it.”

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.”

Sergei Parajanov

“I believe you have to be born a director. It’s like a child’s adventure: you take the initiative among other children and become a director, creating a mystery. You mould things into shape and create.”

Gaspar Noé

“A lot of people cry at the end of the movie. Some people come out and smoke a cigarette. Some people go for a walk or a cigarette in the middle of the movie. Each person handles the movie as he wants...”

Nobuo Nakagawa

Kenneth Anger

[On unemployed filmmakers] "It seems much easier for these people to rent my films, look at them and make notes, than to give them a job."

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”