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.”

Roberto Rossellini

“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”

Roman Polanski

“You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.”

Todd Haynes

“I've always felt more politically comfortable making films that demonstrated problems and didn't tell you how to solve them, but made you feel enough for the subjects who were hurt by these problems...”

Sofia Coppola

“Perhaps it makes sense that a woman whose earliest memory was on the set of Apocalypse Now would grow up to direct a dark fable about five adolescent girls who unapologetically and unceremoniously kill themselves...”

Steven Soderbergh

“To me the director's job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.”

Wim Wenders

“Any movie that has that spirit and says things can be changed is worth making. ”

Lars von Trier

“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”

Pedro Almodóvar

“I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.”

Walter Salles

“The necessity to conceptualize has to come very early on, and defining a vector of development for that film also at the beginning of the process will allow you much more freedom as you go along.”

David Cronenberg

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”

Ang Lee

“Things are being simplified a lot for us lately. I think people are hungry for something that shows more respect for the complexity of life, the depth, the grey areas.”

Neil LaBute

Fernando Meirelles

“We’re supposed to capture what’s in the air and give a form to it. The artist is like an antenna, always searching for new ideas and ways to express them.”

Woody Allen

“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”

David Lynch

“I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead.”