Hiroshi Teshigahara

Sylvain Chomet

Chantal Akerman

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

Lee Chang-dong

“There’s no question that ‘Green Fish’ and ‘Peppermint Candy’ draw on the political and economic problems of Korea. But they weren’t my main focus. My main interest has always been human beings. I believe film is the best medium to show something about human beings.”

Louis Malle

“You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.”

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.”

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.”

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.'”

Elia Kazan

“I like directors who come on the set and create something that’s a little dangerous, difficult or unusual.”

Joel Coen

“The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them. ”

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.”

Chuck Jones

[On one of his most famous characters] "The coyote is victimized by his own ineptitude. I never understood how to use tools and that's really the coyote's problem."

Nick Park

“Gromit was the name of a cat. When I started modeling the cat I just didn`t feel it was quite right, so I made it into a dog because he could have a bigger nose and bigger, longer legs.”

Jacques Tati

“Like a dancer learns to dance ... a visual comic learns to use his legs.”

Carl Theodor Dreyer

“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

“I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.”

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

“I am never quite sure whether I am one of the cinema's elder statesman or just the oldest whore on the beat.”

Fritz Lang

“I should say that I was a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears...to my constant regret.”

Brad Bird

“We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.”