Raúl Ruiz

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

Chris Cunningham

“All I ever do is talk about films and then not make them. As a result I thought: just shut up about it—make a film then talk about it when it's done.”

František Vláčil

“I never worked as anyone's assistant director nor did I ever study at any film academy, thus the Army Film Division was my 'trade school'.”

Yasuzo Masumura

“My goal is to create an exaggerated depiction featuring only the ideas and passions of living human beings.”

Yoshishige Yoshida

“I don’t think it’s possible to have an abstract idea of a man and an abstract idea of a woman and put those two characters in a story.”

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...”

Vincent Gallo

“I constantly try to reinvent my sensibilities and my ideas. I enjoy some of the satisfaction that I get when I feel good about what I've done. But the process is quite lonely and quite painful.”

Alain Robbe-Grillet

“A new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms.”

Sharunas Bartas

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

Jacques Tati

“Like a dancer learns to dance ... a visual comic learns to use his legs.”

Shûji Terayama

“Lying down in the attic, where angry waves sound very close, I make poetry my power.”

Frans Zwartjes

“My own motor system determined the film style.”

Lars von Trier

“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

Joris Ivens

Don Hertzfeldt

“Some people can do great things with CG, but that world just doesn’t interest me or inspire me. I’ve never felt really creative or intuitive using software. I like paper and pens and paint. I need to angle real lights on my artwork and work with my hands and build props. Computers just take all that fun out of it.”

Jonas Mekas

“In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!”

Man Ray

“It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful...it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

“I, as a filmmaker, treat my works as I do my own sons or daughters. I don't care if people are fond of them or despise them, as long as I created them with my best intentions and efforts.”

Stan Brakhage

“There are a lot of movies made for nobody.”