Frederick Wiseman

“There are lots of different ways to make film. I don’t believe there has to be any orthodox way to making movies, or any rules. It’s what works for the filmmaker, and, theoretically, the audience.”

Dariush Mehrjui

“The greatest privilege we have as human beings is the ability to say no.”

Robert Bresson

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

Fernando Lopes

“I am for sure a filmmaker. And so I stayed the same since the beginning, stayed true to myself, because I think cinema is not only matter of aesthetics but also a matter ethics.”

Lotte Reiniger

“I love working for children, because they are a very critical and very thankful public.”

Hou Hsiao-hsien

“The main thing is for the actors to forget the camera. They have to act as if they are working in a documentary.”

Takashi Koizumi

Sadao Yamanaka

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.”

Frank Capra

“My advice to young filmmakers is this: Don’t follow trends. Start them!”

Jean Renoir

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

Luc Besson

“Cinema never saved anyone's life, it is not a medicine that will save anyone's life. It is only an aspirin. There are a few directors that I really loved who made like five, six great movies, but are still shooting and they're not good anymore.”

Jacques Demy

"He has an idea of the world he is trying to apply to the cinema or else… an idea of cinema which he applies to the world." —Jean-Luc Godard

Max Ophüls

“Paris, which had always amused me on holiday, was too lovely… Emigration was no hardship, it was an outing. It offered the shining wet boulevards under the street lights, breakfast in Monmartre with cognac in your glass, coffee and lukewarm brioche, gigolos and prostitutes at night… Everyone in the world has two fatherlands: his own and Paris.”

René Clément

“In a film-making career spanning forty years, René Clément was one of the most acclaimed film directors of his generation, whose masterpiece was 'Forbidden Games', a haunting tale of war's carnage told from a child's point of view. ”

Agnès Varda

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

Arthur Penn

“Life is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

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

Peter Weir

“There’s almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.”

Zacharias Kunuk