Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”

Charlie Chaplin

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

Éric Rohmer

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

Maya Deren

“The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.”

Hong Sang-soo

“When I finish a film, I feel like I have overcome a certain hurdle. It's really good for me as a human being, and I hope that for some people, my films will do the same thing.”

František Vláčil

“I never worked as anyone's assistant director nor did I ever study at any film academy, thus the Army Film Division was my 'trade school'.”

Keisuke Kinoshita

Naomi Kawase

Víctor Erice

“I think that among the arts, cinema is the least known. Its history is generally ignored, and so is, above all, its real nature. As cinema is the most secret of all artistic languages, it is also the least understood.”

Edward Yang

“I was the leader of the Taiwanese new wave. All these guys would just gather in my house, talking and laughing and drinking: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu Nien-jen — just about all of them. You could just push open the door. Everyone just wanted to do similar things. We weren’t allowed to, and no one was willing to give us any money to, but we shared all these idealistic thoughts.”

Yoshishige Yoshida

“I don’t think it’s possible to have an abstract idea of a man and an abstract idea of a woman and put those two characters in a story.”

Shûji Terayama

“Lying down in the attic, where angry waves sound very close, I make poetry my power.”

Hirokazu Kore-eda

“I wanted to create a big lie, meaning the opposite of the documentary-style, naturalist, contemporary films I've been doing.... So far I've tried to use naturalism to search for reality, but now I will try total fiction to search for that reality. ”

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.”

Béla Tarr

“I think censorship is always there. Then it was the censorship of the state and now it's the censorship of the market.”

Nicolas Roeg

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

Billy Wilder

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.”

Guy Maddin

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

Mikio Naruse

“From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me.”

Terrence Malick

“[On Badlands (1973)] I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.”