Bruce Baillie

“Being an artist in a cultural Stone Age, I have no income.”

James Benning

“I have a very simple definition of an artist. The artist is someone who pays attention and reports back.”

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

Stan Brakhage

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

Vittorio De Sica

“I've lost all my money on these films. They are not commercial. But I'm glad to lose it this way. To have for a souvenir of my life pictures like Umberto D. and The Bicycle Thief.”

Atom Egoyan

“I think with all directors there are ideas that recur, at least for the ones that have creative control of their films.”

Federico Fellini

“What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one...”

John Ford

“I hate the cinema. But I like making westerns.”

Hollis Frampton

“This whole business of words – the whole sense of tense and complicated problems about knowledge, about making things in relation to all the things that were already made with words – seems to have fallen into film.”

Jean-Luc Godard

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

John Huston

“The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on.”

Philip Hoffman

Richard Kerr

Guy Maddin

“Whatever I do next, it'll be a horror film.”

Michael Moore

“White people scare the crap out of me. ”

Yasujirô Ozu

“I formulated my own directing style in my own head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others… For me there was no such thing as a teacher. I have relied entirely on my own strength.”

Satyajit Ray

“What is attempted in these films is of course a synthesis. But it can be seen by someone who has his feet in both cultures. Someone who will bring to bear on the films involvement and detachment in equal measure.”

Roberto Rossellini

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

John Sayles

“Oh, I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.”

Martin Scorsese

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