Aki Kaurismäki

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

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.”

Luis Buñuel

“I distrust reason and culture. In our thoughts there are images that appear suddenly, without us pondering them. In all my films, even the most conventional ones, is the tendency to irrational conduct that can not be explained logically.”

Gorō Miyazaki

“You know, kids always want to do against their father, so that really motivated me to do something completely opposite of what he wants me to do. So him being opposed to me becoming a director really helped me motivate myself in film making.”

Sohrab Shahid Saless

“A Simple Event has no plot. It is only a report on the daily life of a boy.”

Salvador Dalí

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”

Andrei Konchalovsky

“My mother was friends with famous directors like Dovzhenko and Eisenstein. I remember Eisenstein taking me on to the set of Ivan the Terrible. I must have been about six. Later when I worked with Tarkov-sky, part of what we were doing was fighting Eisenstein, denying him. By then the great influences on us were Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman.”

Kathryn Bigelow

“I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what my aptitude is, and I really think it's to explore and push the medium. It's not about breaking gender roles or genre traditions.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

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

Nastia Tarasova

Jacques Audiard

“I’m a long-term student but also a committed autodidact. Therefore I’m as much interested in the ways people learn things for themselves as in the way they do through dialogue and communication. I like to film the way someone moves who is acquiring a new skill or learning something about the world.”

Wong Kar-wai

“Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it's the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.”

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.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

“I wanted to make a fake Paris, a Paris of dreams, like in my head when I was twenty and I arrived in Paris for the first time. I wanted to avoid the bad things: traffic jams, dog shit on the street, the rain.”

David Fincher

“I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.”

Miloš Forman

“The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself.”