Denis Côté

“Watching art films all your life and avoiding commercial cinema all your life is not a problem. I’m not ashamed of being in the arty crowd and feeding on it.”

Manoel de Oliveira

[Answering the questions: what keeps you going?] "There is no secret – it is work! It is doing something, it is a natural impulsion. My life is so complicated – I need space around me, I have so much going on and my house is small, and I need breathing space. I cannot seem to sort it out. I cannot either stretch time, or enlarge the house. That would take up precious time which I cannot afford."

Alain Cavalier

Bruno Dumont

“I studied philosophy because it demands an intellectual outlook on the world [...] But I soon discovered that philosophy was too subjective: it lacks heart, it’s over-intellectual, and I found that it made me cut myself off from the everyday.”

Léos Carax

“I perceive 'Pierre' (Pola X) in the same way that I perceive my own life: I understand both 'poorly' but I’m obliged to explore them. That’s what a project is: a heavy question mark. You’re the dot under that mark and you mustn’t let it crush you.”

Robert Bresson

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

Philippe Garrel

“Cinema is Freud plus Lumière.”

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.”

John Ford

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

Nicholas Ray

“You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.”

Aleksandr Sokurov

“The surface of the screen and that of the canvas are one and the same.”

Dziga Vertov

“I am eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.”

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?”

Yasujirô Ozu

“I formulated my own directing style in my own head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others… For me there was no such thing as a teacher. I have relied entirely on my own strength.”

Jean-Luc Godard

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

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.”

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.”

Chris Marker

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