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.”

Sergei Eisenstein

“Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?”

Charlie Chaplin

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

Mauritz Stiller

Victor Sjöström

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

Lindsay Anderson

“Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.”

Jean Renoir

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.”

Frank Capra

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

Andrei Tarkovsky

“Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”

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.”

Woody Allen

“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”

Claude Chabrol

“A woman confronting men is a proper subject, it is inexhaustible.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

Alain Resnais

“I'm always in search of special nonrealistic language that has musicality. ”

Éric Rohmer

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

Akira Kurosawa

“Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied...that's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.”

Jean-Jacques Beineix

“[on releasing the director's cut of Betty Blue] Very simple: More sex, more violence, and more money for me.”

Alfred Hitchcock

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

Luis Buñuel

“If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'”

Jacques Becker

"There are several good ways of making French films. Italian style, like Renoir. Viennese, like Ophuls. New Yorker, like Melville. But only Becker was and is French as France, French as Fontenelle’s rose and Bonnot’s gang." —Jean-Luc Godard