Carl Theodor Dreyer

“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”

Adam Elliot

“All my films are essentially about difference and the way we perceive ourselves and others.”

Barbet Schroeder

“Every time, I try to make something different. ”

Lynne Ramsay

“I've found that film-making's not just a job, it becomes part of your whole life.”

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.”

Grigori Chukhrai

Marcel Carné

“I don't know what they'll say when I die. I don't give a damn, but they'll probably cry.”

Rouben Mamoulian

“Color, like all power, can be harmful and destructive when used badly, life-giving and creative when used well. Animals and human beings have been and are unconsciously subject to a strange hypnotic influence of color. How many times have you walked into a strange house and felt depressed because of the color of the wall-paper! How many times have you found consolation in the rich riot of shades of a gorgeous sunset?”

David Lynch

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

François Truffaut

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

Louis Malle

“You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.”

Luis Buñuel

“If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

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. ”

Vilgot Sjöman

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.”

Seijun Suzuki

“I was never rebellious, I was just mischievous!”