Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

“I love Bresson: he understood everything about the cinema. I like his bare, strained style, his elegance. Pickpocket is a lesson of cinema.”

Jacques Tati

“Like a dancer learns to dance ... a visual comic learns to use his legs.”

Sylvain Chomet

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.”

Denis Villeneuve

Xavier Dolan

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. ”

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.”

Léos Carax

“I perceive 'Pierre' (Pola X) in the same way that I perceive my own life: I understand both 'poorly' but I’m obliged to explore them. That’s what a project is: a heavy question mark. You’re the dot under that mark and you mustn’t let it crush you.”

Michelangelo Antonioni

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

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.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

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

Charlie Chaplin

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

Alfred Hitchcock

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

Claude Lelouch

“I see a film as a puzzle, with a beginning, middle, and end, but I like to start at the end sometimes. I start with sequences that stimulate the viewer’s intelligence and emotions. You have to strike hard from the beginning and create a depressurizing zone between the viewer’s own life and the one onscreen.”

Quentin Tarantino

“I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.”

Denys Arcand

“From my point of view, I’m always the same guy and I make the films the same way from the same budget, often with the same crew. I take all my films seriously and work so hard on them, and then they heap abuse on me. Why? I’m the same person.”

Gus Van Sant

“I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.”

Jean-Luc Godard

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

Federico Fellini

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