Jûzô Itami

“I am trying to discover who I am through making movies. I see myself as being confined in a cage of Japanese culture and the cage of being a man. I have to look at myself from an outsider's point of view when I make my films.”

Gene Kelly

“I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn’t catch on right away.”

Wendell B. Harris Jr.

Ross McElwee

“Although I am always questioning whether or not my films are working as they should, although I agonize whether my persona, my voice in the films, seems authentic enough, I still feel very fortunate to have found at least some kind of a voice, and hence a way of seeing the world with my own eyes.”

Bong Joon-ho

“Human beings basically express their feelings in the same way. They feel the same feelings. If you look at two foreigners talking to each other, you soon can see if they are fighting, or are in love.”

Elaine May

“The only thing experience teaches you is what you can't do. When you start, you think you can do anything. And then you start to get a little tired.”

Charlie Chaplin

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

James Gray

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

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

“I don’t start with a philosophical or thematical approach. Instead I often start with a genre that’s relatively easy to understand and then explore how I want to work in that genre.”

Ermanno Olmi

“...our wars of machines and technology make 'progress' ever more impersonal and deadly - a 'progress' that has not guaranteed man's human, moral, and civil growth.”

Josef von Sternberg

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

Satoshi Kon

“It's true that the attitude of directors towards how to employ CG differs from person to person. In fact I don't think that type of blending has become a natural part of our everyday lives. Our wish is for analog animation to swallow digital animation.”

Max Ophüls

“Paris, which had always amused me on holiday, was too lovely… Emigration was no hardship, it was an outing. It offered the shining wet boulevards under the street lights, breakfast in Monmartre with cognac in your glass, coffee and lukewarm brioche, gigolos and prostitutes at night… Everyone in the world has two fatherlands: his own and Paris.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

“I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.”

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.”

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.”

Stephen Chow

“I used to cry when I watched Chaplin’s films. It was from him that I learned about the role of the underdog. And because I’m also from a poor family, this kind of thing moved me and I found that it also worked for the audience because most of them are like me – ordinary guys.”

Wes Anderson

“I know that feeling of looking back and thinking, that part I'd like to fix. So I obsessively try not to compromise.”

Orson Welles

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

Preston Sturges

“The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.”