Costa-Gavras

“My mother used to say ‘stay away from politics’, because my father went to prison. But if you reject politics, you reject a lot of relationships. The worst thing in society is individualism.”

Dziga Vertov

“I am eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.”

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

Jacques Rivette

“What's important for me in a film is that it be alive, that it be imbued with presence, which is basically the same thing. And that this presence, inscribed within the film, possesses a form of magic. There's something profoundly mysterious in this.”

Jacques Tati

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

Luis Buñuel

“If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'”

Paul Thomas Anderson

“I'll rebel against powers and principalities, all the time. Always, I will.”

Alfred Hitchcock

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

Hiroshi Teshigahara

Alfonso Cuarón

“The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.”

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. ”

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.”

Jean-Luc Godard

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

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.”

Chris Marker

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

Jan Švankmajer

“I never call myself an animated filmmaker because I am interested not in animation techniques or creating a complete illusion, but in bringing life to everyday objects.”

Agnès Varda

“I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.”

Charlie Chaplin

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

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.”