Peter Watkins

“I think that the main impact on my work, on the making of this film, came from the intensity of the similarity I felt to Edvard Munch as a man, as an artist, as someone who struggled throughout his life.”

Jean Eustache

“The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can be.”

Hirokazu Kore-eda

“I wanted to create a big lie, meaning the opposite of the documentary-style, naturalist, contemporary films I've been doing.... So far I've tried to use naturalism to search for reality, but now I will try total fiction to search for that reality. ”

Hollis Frampton

“This whole business of words – the whole sense of tense and complicated problems about knowledge, about making things in relation to all the things that were already made with words – seems to have fallen into film.”

Hiroshi Teshigahara

Michelangelo Antonioni

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

Éric Rohmer

“I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak.”

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.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

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

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful...it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.”

Abbas Kiarostami

“But in all, I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. These are the things I don't like in the movies.”

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.”

Mike Leigh

“The whole thing about making films in an organic film location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across”

Aki Kaurismäki

“Cinema is dead. It died 1962, I think it was in October!”

Elem Klimov

“I’ve lost interest in making films. Everything that was possible I felt I had already done. ”

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.”

Robert Bresson

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