John Smith

Ernst Lubitsch

“There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.”

Jon Jost

Ken Jacobs

“In real life, there’s no stories. Everything is unending, confusing. Nothing starts and concludes. There’s no beginning, middle and end in the actual experience of our lives, and we want this kind of neat little package, and we make them for ourselves in our stories.”

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.”

Alan Rudolph

“I'm me, I live from film to mouth.”

Nick Broomfield

“If you’re making a film, it’s more honest to make your presence felt than to hang back furtively on the other side of the room, because no-one really benefits from that. That approach really is, to use the dread word, voyeuristic. You’re there with all your equipment, but pretending you’re not there.”

Patrick Keiller

“As usual, the question is not whether to argue for materiality or virtuality, but how best to negotiate their reciprocity.”

Bill Douglas

“I was always somewhat obsessed with my past.”

Raúl Ruiz

“If you can make it complicated, why make it simple?”

Donald Cammell

Otto Preminger

[Giving direction to a group of children on Exodus (1960)] "Cry, you little monsters!"

Michael Powell

“I’m not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through the cinema...”

Nagisa Ôshima

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

Vincente Minnelli

“I allow an area for improvisation because the chemical things actors bring to stories make it not work. ”

Norman McLaren

“For myself, indeed, with an abstract film, the most pleasing forms are those which come closest to music. There must be visual equivalence.”

Georges Méliès

“We sat with our mouths open, without speaking, filled with amazement.”

Aki Kaurismäki

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

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. ”

Hal Hartley

“Despite the fact that I love story, character and dialogue, when I isolate the primary elements of film I find photography, movement and sound recording — in that order. Only then do I consider dramatic action. Film is essentially graphic for me.”