Gaël Morel

Terrence Malick

“[On Badlands (1973)] I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.”

Sergei Parajanov

“I believe you have to be born a director. It’s like a child’s adventure: you take the initiative among other children and become a director, creating a mystery. You mould things into shape and create.”

Joseph Losey

“Films can illustrate our existence…they can distress, disturb and provoke people into thinking about themselves and certain problems. But NOT give the answers.”

Mario Bava

“In a horror film, lighting is 70% of the effectiveness. It’s essential in creation the atmosphere.”

Joris Ivens

Lino Brocka

Jacques Tourneur

“I look for very strong visual unity by using a type of framing and camera movement that is very simple. Everything must come from inside. It mustn’t be superficial. I hate weird camera angles and distorting lenses.”

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.”

Alfred Hitchcock

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

Louis Feuillade

“French production is not definitively outclassed by the Americans and that we are not henceforward going to be reduced always to be following in others’ footsteps.”

Charles Burnett

“The impetus was the whole Civil Rights Movement and we felt we had a responsibility to reflect reality, tell the truth about the black community. To help, however we can, to march the social movement forward.”

Tsai Ming-liang

“The body always plays an important role in my films. You could say the body is the most beautiful thing we have or you could say it’s the ugliest thing we have. We can sell bodies, we can adore or worship bodies.”

Edward Yang

“I was the leader of the Taiwanese new wave. All these guys would just gather in my house, talking and laughing and drinking: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu Nien-jen — just about all of them. You could just push open the door. Everyone just wanted to do similar things. We weren’t allowed to, and no one was willing to give us any money to, but we shared all these idealistic thoughts.”

Stanley Kubrick

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

Chantal Akerman

“When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.”

Vsevolod Pudovkin

“Editing is the foundation of the film art.”

Aleksandr Dovzhenko

“As long as a person lives, there is always a chance to correct mistakes and become a better person.”

Miklós Jancsó

“An artist should be able to create his own autonomous world, but making a film depends on so many extraneous factors that I don’t really think it’s an authentic form of art.”

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.”