Abel Ferrara

“I was raised a Catholic and when you're raised a Catholic they don't teach you to think for yourself...you're taught not to think too deeply about things.”

Monte Hellman

“I've been in love with the movies as long as I can remember.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

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

James Gray

“What I’m after, making a film, is the most exact transcript of my most intimate impressions of behavior”

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.”

Sidney Lumet

“All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.”

Takeshi Kitano

“Sword fighting in film is not about how good the fighter is, but how good the actor receiving the blows is.”

Claire Denis

“Even if it's the dream of a voyage, I think it was very important for me that the film offer the two sides of the globe.”

Jonathan Glazer

Alfonso Cuarón

“The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.”

Robert Aldrich

“A director is a ringmaster, a psychiatrist and a referee.”

Richard Kelly

“I don’t ever want to make an impersonal film.”

Todd 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.”

Orson Welles

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

Peter Watkins

“I think that the main impact on my work, on the making of this film, came from the intensity of the similarity I felt to Edvard Munch as a man, as an artist, as someone who struggled throughout his life.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Glauber Rocha

“Cinema Novo stood with the Brazilian utopia. If it is ugly, irregular, dirty, confusing and chaotic, it is also beautiful, disharmonic, luminous and revolutionary.”