Raúl Ruiz

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

Christopher Petit

Agnès Varda

“I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.”

Michael Snow

“If there are ‘narrative cinema’ elements in my films I don’t want them to take you ‘elsewhere’ but to keep you here watching the film, a construct, an artificiality.”

Larry Jordan

“I make films in the surrealist manner forcing inspiration as often as possible. When I am not inspired, I do not make films. I have always wanted to show the 'impossible' in my films, and to astonish the viewer, rather than entertain or tell the truth. ”

Ernie Gehr

Bruce Conner

“With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.”

Peter Greenaway

“I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.”

Bruce Baillie

“Being an artist in a cultural Stone Age, I have no income.”

Chris Marker

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

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.”

Jacques Rivette

“What's important for me in a film is that it be alive, that it be imbued with presence, which is basically the same thing. And that this presence, inscribed within the film, possesses a form of magic. There's something profoundly mysterious in this.”

Nicolas Roeg

“You make the movie through the cinematography - it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.”

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.”

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.”

Wim Wenders

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

Steven Soderbergh

“To me the director's job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.”

Buster Keaton

“I don't act anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.”

Howard Hawks

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

John Ford

“I hate the cinema. But I like making westerns.”