Bruce Conner

“With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.”

Robert Bresson

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

Maya Deren

“The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.”

Len Lye

“One of my art teachers put me onto trying to find my own art theory. After many morning walks…an idea hit me that seemed like a complete revelation. It was to compose motion, just as musicians compose sound. [The idea] was to lead me far, far away from wanting to excel in…traditional art.”

Robert Breer

“For me, the cinema medium is just an arbitrary thing which was invented that way to provide for the reproduction of natural movements. What I'm interested in is to attack the basic material, to tear up film, pick up the pieces and rearrange them.”

Jacques Tati

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

Jan Švankmajer

“I never call myself an animated filmmaker because I am interested not in animation techniques or creating a complete illusion, but in bringing life to everyday objects.”

Stan Brakhage

“There are a lot of movies made for nobody.”

Kelly Reichardt

“I like working in a really private way. I mean, we got as far as a cut of [Old Joy] without speaking to any kind of lawyer or anything. We got into Sundance before we thought we should form a company. Aside from a lot of sound work and stuff still to go, it was all very private, and that’s a dream for me.”

Peggy Ahwesh

Víctor Erice

“I think that among the arts, cinema is the least known. Its history is generally ignored, and so is, above all, its real nature. As cinema is the most secret of all artistic languages, it is also the least understood.”

Wladyslaw Starewicz

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.”

Peter Hutton

“Practice, practice, practice and the camera becomes your eye and not so much this complicated technological thing to mediate to get an image.”

Spike Lee

“I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.”

Joseph Cornell

“Shadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime.”

Jim Jarmusch

“I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are. ”

Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”

Lukas Moodysson

“I'm not particularly interested in probing the depths of my soul; I'm more into probing the world around me.”

Tim Burton

“I've always loved the idea of fairy tales, but somehow I never managed to completely connect with them. What interests me is taking those classic images and themes and trying to contemporize them a bit. I believe folk tales and fairy tales have some sort of psychological foundation that makes that possible.”