Aleksey Balabanov

“People have always watched and will watch films about bandits.”

Jean Vigo

[on his film, Nizza] “In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial. The last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution.”

Kira Muratova

“What is most important to me is to please myself.”

Sergei Loznitsa

“I want my films to urge the viewers to move towards self-knowledge, self-awareness, and awareness of certain important things that they never considered before. This is of the greatest importance to me”

George Stevens

“To produce and direct a movie today, a man really ought to have two heads. It is like trying to be a traffic cop and write a poem at the same time.”

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.”

Sharunas Bartas

“Sadness is a much more stable emotion in people than happiness.”

So Yong Kim

[on casting "Treeless Mountain"] "When I met Hee Yeon, I knew she would be perfect. She had this unusual self-confidence and strength. From our first interview, Hee Yeon challenged me in a way that young Korean children do not normally question authority. I discovered Song Hee, who plays Bin, through a photograph which was sent to me by my assistant in Korea. I fell in love with her face."

Kátia Lund

[on making "City of God"] "When I made the film, it was much more important to me to bring the issue [of urban violence] to debate because, in Brazil, no one was talking about these things."

Paul Schrader

“What fascinates me are people who want to be one thing but who behave in a way contradictory to that. Who might say, ‘I want to be happy, but I keep doing things that make me unhappy.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

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

Bae Yong-Kyun

“Each image was described precisely, the slightest movement of a knife, the atmosphere. Everything was written out.”

Seijun Suzuki

“I was never rebellious, I was just mischievous!”

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.”

Nagisa Ôshima

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

Jodie Mack

Zeki Ökten

Jørgen Leth

“That’s the beauty of art, really—that you don’t know where it will take you.”

Andrea Štaka

Metin Erksan