Nina Menkes

“For me, cinema is sorcery, a creative way to interact with the world in order to rearrange perception and expand consciousness, both the viewers and my own.”

Guy Debord

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

Richard Kelly

“I don’t ever want to make an impersonal film.”

Sarah Polley

“Being a human being is all about experiencing all of the wonders of the world and therefore as an actress, I'm open to any opportunity that may enrich my horizon.”

Shûji Terayama

“Lying down in the attic, where angry waves sound very close, I make poetry my power.”

Robert Wiene

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

Hou Hsiao-hsien

“The main thing is for the actors to forget the camera. They have to act as if they are working in a documentary.”

Matthew Barney

“A lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn't have an ego when it's wanting to throw up. It just does it.”

Georges Franju

“Surrealism had taught me that reason comes after creation, and creation is a true deflagration when confronted, not with a solution, but an obstacle.”

José Mojica Marins

“I was thinking a name: Josefel: “fel” ("gall") for being bitter and also Zanatas as a last name, because backward reads Satanas”

Luc Besson

“Cinema never saved anyone's life, it is not a medicine that will save anyone's life. It is only an aspirin. There are a few directors that I really loved who made like five, six great movies, but are still shooting and they're not good anymore.”

Jacques Rivette

“What's important for me in a film is that it be alive, that it be imbued with presence, which is basically the same thing. And that this presence, inscribed within the film, possesses a form of magic. There's something profoundly mysterious in this.”

Hiroshi Teshigahara

John Waters

“Some call me director, producer, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.”

Spike Jonze

“Being able to shoot on videos and commercials — just being on the set, with only a certain amount of time and shots and sequences to do in that amount of time, learning how to work with the crew the physical production and the limitations — is all good training.”

Éric Rohmer

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

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. ”

Darren Aronofsky

“To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don't think is a good ride.”

Dušan Makavejev

“You just see so many movies that at some point it becomes part of your life...Movies always follow us as reference material or as some kind of dreamlike material for dealing with things we don't understand in our lives. Movies give us solutions, or provide a whispering commentary on what is happening around us.”