Michel Gondry

“Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”

Dagur Kári

“I am fascinated by the idea of taking every scene as a film and making every scene as good as you want the film to be. I hate to shoot a scene where a guy walks out the door and takes a bus just to show that he takes the bus because this frame can never have the potential of becoming a great scene. I try to treat every scene as it were the only scene.”

Athina Rachel Tsangari

Jane Campion

“What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.”

Pen-ek Ratanaruang

“In Last Life In The Universe we wanted the audience not to notice when the music comes in or when it goes out. It's there to create atmosphere. I'm drawn to any style of music as long as it's sad. I'm very fond of depressing music. I think it's beautiful.”

Bill Plympton

“In a perfect world, I would prefer just to draw all day and make these cartoons. But the problem is, if I work for a big studio, then I would lose a lot of my creative ideas.”

Yoshishige Yoshida

“I don’t think it’s possible to have an abstract idea of a man and an abstract idea of a woman and put those two characters in a story.”

Elia Suleiman

“The relationship between the moment of truth that you capture and the moment of truth that the spectator captures is incredible. This is what I consider the godliness of communication.”

Chantal Akerman

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

Serge Gainsbourg

“Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.”

Christopher Nolan

“I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today's movies. They believe everything they're hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.”

Isild Le Besco

“My first step writing, was the idea of going to the snow and having sex with a girl. It changed later to the sea. But that was the most important thing, the loneliness of being young and alone.”

Agnès Varda

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

Götz Spielmann

“There is, behind all the conflicts and painful things I show in my films, a fundamental spark of optimism - the conviction that life isn't a mistake, that it all somehow makes sense.”

Nicholas Ray

“You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.”

Jerzy Skolimowski

Nobuhiro Yamashita

Richard Linklater

“I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists. ”

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

Azazel Jacobs

“I really valued what my father and mother were doing from as far back as I can remember.”