Martin Scorsese

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

Harmony Korine

“When I was a child the temptation to sin was always a romantic option. This romantic option lead me to the cinema, a place where sin was welcome.”

Léos Carax

“I perceive 'Pierre' (Pola X) in the same way that I perceive my own life: I understand both 'poorly' but I’m obliged to explore them. That’s what a project is: a heavy question mark. You’re the dot under that mark and you mustn’t let it crush you.”

Guy Maddin

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

Robert Bresson

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Koreyoshi Kurahara

Aki Kaurismäki

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

Seijun Suzuki

“I was never rebellious, I was just mischievous!”

Andrea Arnold

“Dramatically, I like darkness, I like conflict - but I don't see the world as defined by them. And why would I pretend to? That's not who I am.”

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.”

Jacques Tati

“Like a dancer learns to dance ... a visual comic learns to use his legs.”

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.”

Lynne Ramsay

“I've found that film-making's not just a job, it becomes part of your whole life.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ”

Ken Loach

“A movie isn't a political movement, a party or even an article. It's just a film. At best it can add its voice to public outrage.”

Mike Leigh

“The whole thing about making films in an organic film location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across”

Jean-Pierre Melville

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

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.”

Steve McQueen

“My influences come from real life. I’m not interested in cinema for cinema’s sake. I’m interested in life—what one does and how one interacts.”