Frank Borzage

“Make the audience sentimental instead of the player. Make the audience act.”

Max Ophüls

“Paris, which had always amused me on holiday, was too lovely… Emigration was no hardship, it was an outing. It offered the shining wet boulevards under the street lights, breakfast in Monmartre with cognac in your glass, coffee and lukewarm brioche, gigolos and prostitutes at night… Everyone in the world has two fatherlands: his own and Paris.”

Éric Rohmer

“I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak.”

Abdellatif Kechiche

Semih Kaplanoğlu

Frank Capra

“My advice to young filmmakers is this: Don’t follow trends. Start them!”

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.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”

Charlie Chaplin

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

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. ”

Robert Siodmak

“Making a film is a matter of cooperation. If you look at the final credits, which nobody reads except for insiders, then you are surprised to see how many colleagues you had who took care of all the details. The director, of course, has everything under control.”

James Toback

Howard Hawks

“I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! ”

George Cukor

“I don't weep or anything, but there's always some part of me left bloody on the scene I've just directed.”

Alfred Hitchcock

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

Gus Van Sant

“I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.”

Wong Kar-wai

“Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it's the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.”

Bahman Ghobadi

“The camera became a weapon in my hands to express my opinions. As I grew more mature and my vision expanded, I thought I could raise questions and show the problems and hardships of the Kurds.”

Terrence Malick

“[On Badlands (1973)] I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.”

Pedro Almodóvar

“I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.”