Shôhei Imamura

“I show true things using fictional techniques but maintaining truthfulness — that's where my approach differs from Ozu. He wanted to make film more aesthetic. I want to make it more real. He aspired toward a cinematic nirvana. When I was his assistant, I was very opposed to him, but now, whilst still not liking his films, I'm much more tolerant. As for me, I'd like to destroy this premise that cinema is fiction.”

Ken Jacobs

“In real life, there’s no stories. Everything is unending, confusing. Nothing starts and concludes. There’s no beginning, middle and end in the actual experience of our lives, and we want this kind of neat little package, and we make them for ourselves in our stories.”

Paul Verhoeven

“People love seeing violence and horrible things. The human being is bad and he can't stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness and he'd walk out or fall asleep.”

Philippe Garrel

“Cinema is Freud plus Lumière.”

Nobuhiro Suwa

Ben Rivers

Roberto Rossellini

“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”

Chantal Akerman

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

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.”

Robert Bresson

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Michael Mann

“I cannot just make a film and walk away from it. I need that creative intimacy, and quite frankly, the control to execute my visions, on all my projects.”

Bertrand Bonello

“Mythology was the result of a polytheist society, today the oracle of my film who tells people their future clashes with Church dogma.”

Stan Brakhage

“There are a lot of movies made for nobody.”

Aleksandr Sokurov

“The surface of the screen and that of the canvas are one and the same.”

F.W. Murnau

“Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture...we are scientists engaged in the creation of memory... but our memory will neither blur nor fade.”

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.'”

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.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

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

Philippe Grandrieux

“I never watched any rushes. Because I frame the shots and operate the camera, the images are directly inscribed on my retina.”

Bruno Dumont

“I studied philosophy because it demands an intellectual outlook on the world [...] But I soon discovered that philosophy was too subjective: it lacks heart, it’s over-intellectual, and I found that it made me cut myself off from the everyday.”