Sharunas Bartas

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

Richard Kern

“Everything else seemed so pretentious, so we were always trying to do stuff that was totally unjustifiable.”

Luc Dardenne

“Of course, we always hope our films will speak to people, disturb them, but we never hoped to change the world”

Jean-Pierre Dardenne

“The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.”

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.”

Terry Zwigoff

“I keep going back to the Forties and Fifties for films, I go back to the Twenties and Thirties for music. For some reason I really like these films from the Forties and Fifties, whether they’re American, French, whatever… I can’t quite put my finger on it, “dark” is the best way I know to describe the quality that I like in them.”

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.”

Joe Swanberg

“I realized that because I'd been producing so much work, I hadn't changed enough as a person between projects. At that point I couldn't make another movie even if I'd wanted to, because I hadn't had a life for so long.”

Lodge Kerrigan

"I have a long-standing interest in mental illness. I have friends who suffer from it. I think it’s a devastating illness, not only mentally, psychologically, emotionally, but also economically. I think it isolates people tremendously, and again, I want to try and engender some empathy for people who suffer."

Rob Zombie

“NC-17 means that you get it in like 3 theaters. They won't run the spots on TV, won't run the advertising. It's the kiss of death so there was really no other choice.”

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.”

Nicolas Roeg

“You make the movie through the cinematography - it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.”

Koen Mortier

Ulrich Seidl

“If I manage to make people laugh with my films and their laughter gets stuck in their throat in the next moment, if I succeed in doing that, then that makes me happy.”

Paweł Pawlikowski

Andrew Bujalski

“When you have to live with something for so many years, the film becomes indistinguishable from what you think of as your life. I’m sure there’s a danger to that. But there are also great things that can come from that.”

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.”

Atom Egoyan

“I think with all directors there are ideas that recur, at least for the ones that have creative control of their films.”

Michael Haneke

“Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer?”

Takashi Miike

“I don't think about the audience, I don't think about what makes them happy, because there's no way for me to know. They think of the audience as a mass, but in fact every person in the audience is different. So entertainment for everyone doesn't exist.”