Dimitri Kirsanoff

Lee Chang-dong

“There’s no question that ‘Green Fish’ and ‘Peppermint Candy’ draw on the political and economic problems of Korea. But they weren’t my main focus. My main interest has always been human beings. I believe film is the best medium to show something about human beings.”

Marcel L'Herbier

“There was one thing I detested more than anything, and that was money; first of all, because I was bankrupt; then, because I had been seeing so many examples all around me where money had played a fatal role.”

Masahiro Shinoda

“It is much more fun to look at evil than to look at good!”

Peter Watkins

“I think that the main impact on my work, on the making of this film, came from the intensity of the similarity I felt to Edvard Munch as a man, as an artist, as someone who struggled throughout his life.”

Vittorio De Sica

“I've lost all my money on these films. They are not commercial. But I'm glad to lose it this way. To have for a souvenir of my life pictures like Umberto D. and The Bicycle Thief.”

Pedro Costa

“If you don't risk yourself and the people with whom you're working in almost every shot you make, it's not good, it's useless, it's just another film.”

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.”

Brian De Palma

“So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point. ”

Victor Sjöström

“The thing that brought me into filmmaking was a youthful desire for adventure and a curiosity to try this new medium.”

Jia Zhangke

“I believe that it doesn't really matter how large an audience my film gets; as long as my films can be shown in China, and there can be any kind of real market for them here, that would be hugely significant for me personally.”

Georges Franju

“Surrealism had taught me that reason comes after creation, and creation is a true deflagration when confronted, not with a solution, but an obstacle.”

Louis Feuillade

“French production is not definitively outclassed by the Americans and that we are not henceforward going to be reduced always to be following in others’ footsteps.”

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

“I don’t start with a philosophical or thematical approach. Instead I often start with a genre that’s relatively easy to understand and then explore how I want to work in that genre.”

Wim Wenders

“Any movie that has that spirit and says things can be changed is worth making. ”

André De Toth

Jean Cocteau

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

René Laloux

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

Chris Marker

“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”

Michael Haneke

“Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer?”