Ti West

“The independent world and the studio world are very different. The independent world is about, "Let's get this movie made because it's going to be awesome and we believe in it," and the studio world is about slow business decisions.”

Joachim Trier

“I think, to create reality in film, you still have to go through constructedness; you gotta go through a process of artifice anyways. I'm not one of those people who thinks, "Oh, the real person will seem real on the screen;" to create something that is seemingly real takes a lot of work. But having said that, I try to structure the scenes quite tightly, but then within that, leave them some space to go unexpected places.”

Paul Fejos

Luís Galvão Teles

Pitof

Patricia Mazuy

Valérie Donzelli

Stephen Dwoskin

“I do not reflect on the media, I do my work, I work on people.”

François Reichenbach

João Mário Grilo

Agustí Villaronga

Nicolas Roeg

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

Gleb Panfilov

““[Atmosphere] is a very important thing, one of the most important things in filmmaking. Direction begins exactly with atmosphere. I make the distinction between good and bad films based on atmosphere. The atmosphere of a debut film is ruthless evidence of whether the director has any future or if he’s just a mediocrity. For example, seeing Ivan’s Childhood, I realized – I was still an engineer then, and didn’t know anything about cinema – that here is a director that will go on to do great things.”

Robert Guédiguian

Carmelo Bene

“[Cinema] it’s the celebration of the Lumière Brothers. That is: since the Lumière period, what has come out of it? If you exclude that minimum of "self-fright” sought at all costs, or that hint of bewilderment in certain African tribes, at the sight of that train. The Lumières… I think their commemoration goes on since 19th century. The same one which has been perpetuated.”

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.”

Markus Schleinzer

James Gray

“What I’m after, making a film, is the most exact transcript of my most intimate impressions of behavior.”

Giorgos Lanthimos

Elem Klimov

“I’ve lost interest in making films. Everything that was possible I felt I had already done. ”