Peter Brook

John Huston

“The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on.”

Guy Maddin

“Whatever I do next, it'll be a horror film.”

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.”

Pietro Germi

Jules Dassin

“If there is anything I want to be remembered for, it is for fulfilling Melina's dream [the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece].”

David Cronenberg

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”

John Cassavetes

“The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

“I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ”

Todd Solondz

“Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can’t celebrate humanity but I’m not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.”

Robert Bresson

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Michael Haneke

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

Douglas Sirk

“If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.”

Derek Jarman

“I wouldn’t wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem you could be unaware of it.”

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

Aki Kaurismäki

“Cinema is dead. It died 1962, I think it was in October!”

Jane Campion

“What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.”

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.”