Jim Jarmusch

“I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are. ”

Sean Byrne

Kim Ki-duk

“I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.”

Rob Reiner

“Everybody talks about wanting to change things and help and fix, but ultimately all you can do is fix yourself. And that's a lot.”

Jun Ichikawa

Sam Peckinpah

“The end of a picture is always an end of a life.”

Bertrand Bonello

“Mythology was the result of a polytheist society, today the oracle of my film who tells people their future clashes with Church dogma.”

Robert Bresson

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

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.”

Chris Marker

“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”

Vincent Gallo

“I constantly try to reinvent my sensibilities and my ideas. I enjoy some of the satisfaction that I get when I feel good about what I've done. But the process is quite lonely and quite painful.”

Lee Chang-dong

“There’s no question that ‘Green Fish’ and ‘Peppermint Candy’ draw on the political and economic problems of Korea. But they weren’t my main focus. My main interest has always been human beings. I believe film is the best medium to show something about human beings.”

Sofia Coppola

“Perhaps it makes sense that a woman whose earliest memory was on the set of Apocalypse Now would grow up to direct a dark fable about five adolescent girls who unapologetically and unceremoniously kill themselves...”

Gaspar Noé

“A lot of people cry at the end of the movie. Some people come out and smoke a cigarette. Some people go for a walk or a cigarette in the middle of the movie. Each person handles the movie as he wants...”

Mike Nichols

“Nerves provide me with energy...It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that I get worried.”

Don Hertzfeldt

“Some people can do great things with CG, but that world just doesn’t interest me or inspire me. I’ve never felt really creative or intuitive using software. I like paper and pens and paint. I need to angle real lights on my artwork and work with my hands and build props. Computers just take all that fun out of it.”

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.”

Pedro Almodóvar

“I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.”

Bernardo Bertolucci

“I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.”

Michel Gondry

“Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”