Victor Sjöström

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

Nathaniel Dorsky

Jean Vigo

[on his film, Nizza] “In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial. The last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution.”

Kenji Mizoguchi

“You must put the odor of the human body into images...describe for me the implacable, the egoistic, the sensual, the cruel...there are nothing but disgusting people in this world.”

Kaneto Shindô

“My mind was always on the commoners, not on the lords, politicans, or anyone of name and fame. I wanted to convey the lives of down-to-earth people who live like weeds.”

Paul Schrader

“What fascinates me are people who want to be one thing but who behave in a way contradictory to that. Who might say, ‘I want to be happy, but I keep doing things that make me unhappy.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

“Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”

Masaki Kobayashi

“In any era, I am critical of authoritarian power.”

Hiroshi Teshigahara

Spike Lee

“I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.”

Budd Schulberg

Orson Welles

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

Anthony Mann

"Primarily known for his Westerns, Mann portrayed a world of violence against some of the most striking natural vistas in cinema history. His crime films are gritty and real, and all his work reflects an exploration of the complex psychology of the human soul." —William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)

F.W. Murnau

“Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture...we are scientists engaged in the creation of memory... but our memory will neither blur nor fade.”

Nick Park

“Gromit was the name of a cat. When I started modeling the cat I just didn`t feel it was quite right, so I made it into a dog because he could have a bigger nose and bigger, longer legs.”

Steve James

Jim Jarmusch

“I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are. ”

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.”

Andrzej Wajda

“When a film is created, it is created in a language, which is not only about words, but also the way that very language encodes our perception of the world, our understanding of it.”

Fred Zinnemann

“I will always think of myself as a Hollywood director, not only because I grew up in the American film industry, but also because I believe in making films that will please a mass audience, and not just in making films that express my own personality or ideas. I have always tried to offer an audience something positive in a film and to entertain them as well.”