Luis Buñuel

“If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'”

Roy Andersson

“I felt that film-making generally didn't reach the level you could find in painting or literature or music. It was for one-time use only, and more and more, the movies were losing their visual power - they were concentrating on the plot only. That's why I started wanting to be a film director myself. It wasn't only the plot that was interesting; it was the touch, the feeling, something visually rich.”

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.”

Stanley Kubrick

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

Robert Altman

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Kim Ki-young

“I just make films by following my heart, so the analysis I leave to all of you.”

Miklós Jancsó

“An artist should be able to create his own autonomous world, but making a film depends on so many extraneous factors that I don’t really think it’s an authentic form of art.”

Aleksei German

John Huston

“The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on.”

Josef von Sternberg

“I care nothing about the story, only how it is photographed and presented.”

Samuel Fuller

“Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.”

Rolan Bykov

Joel Coen

“The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them. ”

Paul Thomas Anderson

“I'll rebel against powers and principalities, all the time. Always, I will.”

Quentin Tarantino

“I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.”

Roman Polanski

“You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.”

Martin Scorsese

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