"Cinema has become my life. I don’t mean a parallel world. I mean life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.”
--Pedro Almodóvar (1949-)
"Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes."
--Robert Altman (1925-2006)
"I have always considered movies evil; the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind. Centuries before photographs there were talismans, which actually anticipated photographs... Photography is a blatant attempt to steal the soul."
--Kenneth Anger (1930-)
In 1942, after a year in a German prisoner-of-war camp, he began his career as director. His entire output consisted of only 13 films, but they include some of the most artistically and technically substantial in French cinema.
--Jacques Becker (1906-1960)
"I would like to thank my parents. They gave me the biggest gift of poverty. And I want to thank them for the rest of my life... And thank you for your love. I'm here because people love the movie. It's always a question of love... I would like to dedicate this to those who are not here. They gave their life, so that we could say that life is beautiful."
--Roberto Benigni (1952-)
This is something that I dream about: to live films, to arrive at the point at which one can live for films, can think cinematographically, eat cinematographically, sleep cinematographically, as a poet, a painter, lives, eats, sleeps painting.
--Bernardo Bertolucci (1940-)
"We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get... Art is a sense of magic."
--Stan Brakhage (1933-2003)
"My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water... When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best - that is inspiration."
--Robert Bresson (1907-1999)
"Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being."
--Ken Burns (1953-)
C"To deny women directors, as I suspect is happening in the States, is to deny the feminine vision."
--Jane Campion (1954-)
"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the number one hormone; it bosses the enzymes; directs the pineal gland; plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film."
--Frank Capra (1897-1991)
"I don't know what they'll say when I die. I don't give a damn, but they'll probably cry."
--Marcel Carné (1906-1996)
"With very few exceptions, the best original scenarios have been written either by writers who knew the cinema particularly well, or by professional film workers. Although it may seem at first sight that anybody should be able to write a film scenario, experience shows that good scenarios are very rare."
--René Clair (1898-1981)
"You think that people are all good or all bad. You think that good means light and bad means night? But where does night end and light begin? Where is the borderline? Do you even know which side you belong on?" [Dr Vorzet from Le Corbeau]
--Henri-G. Clouzot (1907-77)
"We create monsters and then we can't control them. "..
--Joel & Ethan Coen (1954- & 1957-)
"Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to."
--David Cronenberg (1943-)
"Give me a good script and I'll be a hundred times better as a director."
--George Cukor (1899-1983)
One of the most idealistic neorealist filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s, he wrote and directed films punctuated by ardent cries for social reform.
--Giuseppe de Santis (1917-97)
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