Masahiro Shinoda

“It is much more fun to look at evil than to look at good!”

Stéphane Brizé

Lisandro Alonso

“If tomorrow I have to quit filmmaking, I will. I’m not going to sell my house for a project, that’s for sure. If I have to go back and work on my family’s farm, fine. I don’t have any problem with it. But I would cry a lot.”

Tinto Brass

“A face can be painted over with make-up, conceal its age or impurities; a mouth can spew cruel lies. A butt is definitely more honest than that.”

Wolfgang Becker

“The film is a symbolic funeral in dignity to all that, I think. It hit a nerve.” [about "Good Bye Lenin!"]

Whit Stillman

“For me, the present is a golden era that’s ending too. That’s the greatest golden era. Right now. [Laughs.] I just like pining for lost times. I can pine for this morning.”

Maurice Pialat

“What I try to do, with the actors' consent, is to create something by beginning with a set situation that we can deviate from in the course of the shoot. ”

Sally Potter

“I've always traveled with the films because I want the audience to be my teacher so that I can learn for the next one.”

Hiroshi Shimizu

People like me and Ozu get films made by hard work, but Shimizu is a genius… —Kenji Mizoguchi

Masaki Kobayashi

“In any era, I am critical of authoritarian power.”

Park Chan-wook

“The audience seems hazy to me, shrouded in a veil through which I can't see.”

Michael Haneke

“Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer?”

Buster Keaton

“I don't act anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.”

Leo McCarey

“I love when people laugh. I love when they cry, I like a story to say something, and I hope the audience feels happier leaving the theater than when it came in.”

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.”

Hal Roach

“In those days, there was one secret to making a good comedy. If it made the audience laugh, it was a good comedy.”

Busby Berkeley

“In an era of breadlines, depression and wars, I tried to help people get away from all the misery…to turn their minds to something else. I wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour.”

Preston Sturges

“The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.”

Peter Bogdanovich

“It's a misconception about acting that it's a practice in pretending to be someone else. It's actually a practice in finding the character within yourself.”

Howard Hawks

“I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! ”