Nikos Nikolaidis

“A few days before we started shooting, some weird stangers appeared resembling Che Guevara’s cousins and told me 'Give us your script to read and we’ll let you know whether you should make this movie.' Of course, I gave it to them. Two days later they returned saying 'We like it, you can go ahead.' And I went ahead and shot it.”

John Huston

“The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on.”

Nagisa Ôshima

“My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it.”

Kaneto Shindô

“My mind was always on the commoners, not on the lords, politicans, or anyone of name and fame. I wanted to convey the lives of down-to-earth people who live like weeds.”

Buster Keaton

“I don't act anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

Lucrecia Martel

“From the very beginning, even when I’m writing, I think a lot about the sound. Many elements of my work in cinema come from oral storytelling and oral tradition. I think about sound and the rhythm of the sound.”

John Cassavetes

“The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.”

Howard Hawks

“I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! ”

Hiroshi Teshigahara

Marco Bellocchio

“For me a film grows from an image.”

Benoît Jacquot

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.”

Shunji Iwai

“I like analogue things more than plastic things. But as for picture quality, 35 mm is just half the size it can be, which is an issue for me.”

Arnaud Desplechin

“Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare...”

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.”

Julio Medem

“I want my own experience with each film to be new, so I try to run away fully from the film I made before and make something completely different.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

“Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”

Roman Polanski

“You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.”