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.”

Mathieu Kassovitz

“I have a hard enough time speaking for myself - I don't pretend I can be a spokesman for anybody. I have no interest in playing that role.”

Jean Renoir

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.”

Masaki Kobayashi

“In any era, I am critical of authoritarian power.”

Yasujirô Ozu

“I formulated my own directing style in my own head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others… For me there was no such thing as a teacher. I have relied entirely on my own strength.”

Sergei Eisenstein

“Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?”

Souleymane Cissé

“Every nation has the right to be represented by the cinema.”

Seijun Suzuki

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

Zeki Demirkubuz

“As a filmmaker, what attracts me most in human nature is its dark side.”

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.”

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

“Many people went to see MEMORIES more than once, and some returned as many as four or five times. That does not happen with many movies. It makes me think that the film hit its mark, which was, first and foremost, to communicate with the Cuban public, not with audiences from other countries. It achieved its goal in the sense that it disturbed and unsettled its audience; it forced people to think.”

Abbas Kiarostami

“But in all, I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. These are the things I don't like in the movies.”

Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”

Alfred Hitchcock

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

Clint Eastwood

“...in America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience. Not to say that it's all bad, but it leaves a lot of the rest of us out of it. To me cinema can be a much more friendly world if there's a lot of things to choose from.”

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.”

Agnès Varda

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

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.”

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.”

Luis García Berlanga