Carlos Reygadas

“Theatre is interesting as a catharsis for actors because it's the only way you can be idiotic and get away with it. I really, really don't like theatre and I feel so far from it.”

Sharunas Bartas

“Sadness is a much more stable emotion in people than happiness.”

Sion Sono

Lukas Moodysson

“I'm not particularly interested in probing the depths of my soul; I'm more into probing the world around me.”

Jos Stelling

“The best film audience is the female audience. What I mean is not necessarily “woman”, but ‘feminine’. The female associates, while the typical male expects that a plot goes from a to b. Cinema is the art of association, and women can do that well.”

Shirin Neshat

“My only advice is to spend less time on thinking about success and put all the energy in making art itself. Otherwise your relationship to your art changes. It becomes less genuine and honest. Art should not be born from a pressure of becoming successful but something deeper. This is always a danger and the cause for mediocrity in art.”

Lav Diaz

“You look at the industry; they’re distorting everything, its very escapist. It’s all about vanity, about making money, about seeking fame and fortune.”

Denis Côté

“Watching art films all your life and avoiding commercial cinema all your life is not a problem. I’m not ashamed of being in the arty crowd and feeding on it.”

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

“In my films the landscapes connect the characters to a sense of something cosmic. I try to recapture those moments in life where you suddenly feel that connection to a wider universe.”

Fatih Akin

“The funnier it is in the beginning of a story, the more dramatic it can become. Because when an audience is laughing, that's opening their souls somehow, and when you have an audience with an open soul, it's much better to hit them with a knife.”

Fritz Lang

“I should say that I was a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears...to my constant regret.”

Bo Widerberg

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful...it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.”

Andrzej Wajda

“When a film is created, it is created in a language, which is not only about words, but also the way that very language encodes our perception of the world, our understanding of it.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

“Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”

Wim Wenders

“Any movie that has that spirit and says things can be changed is worth making. ”

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.”

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

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