John Woo

“The movies I like to make are very rich and full of passion. Some people see me as an action director, but action is not the only thing in my movies. I always like to show human nature - something deep inside the heart.”

Mohsen Makhmalbaf

“From my films, you can at least learn about Iran, you can get a sense of the history and the society. But no such films have been made about Afghanistan, so you really can't know much about it.”

Fritz Lang

“I should say that I was a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears...to my constant regret.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

François Truffaut

“I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.”

Jean-Pierre Melville

“I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.”

Akira Kurosawa

“Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied...that's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.”

Herbert Achternbusch

Volker Schlöndorff

“As soon as I see “based upon a true story” at the beginning of a film, I always I think that it must be full of lies. The difference is not really about whether the events happened or not. It’s that in the fictions, reality is already put into a certain shape, and this structure has always appealed to me throughout my career. I found it easier to move from there into a movie rather than being confronted with the total complexity of reality.”

Peter Greenaway

“I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.”

Djibril Diop Mambéty

“The word griot... is the word for what I do and the role that the filmmaker has in society...the griot is a messenger of one's time, a visionary and the creator of the future.”

Raoul Peck

“I am not interested in avant-gardist narrative form, but rather in ideological deconstruction. The idea is by multiplying angles and superposing layers of narrative, you can create a different perception, closer to reality. I advance step by step, trying all possible combinations.”

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. ”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

“Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”

Andrei Tarkovsky

“Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”

Wong Kar-wai

“Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it's the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.”

Alexander Kluge

“We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ”

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.”