World Famous Directors Quotes

Fererico Fellini:

'I always direct the same film. I cannot distinguish one from the other.'

'If you do what you were born to do, I think you will never grow old.'

'All artists are equal when they are themselves'

'I make pictures to tell a story, to tell lies, and to amuse.'

'Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.'

'You exist only in what you do.'

'Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.'

'A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.'

'It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman'

'Through the ages, from the beginning of time, I'm certain man has covered woman's face with masks. They are, however, his masks, not hers.'

'I'd like very much to make a confident picture. I would like to be as good as nature, which, with a shower, produces flowers and grass to cover the destruction. But we are surrounded by human fragmentation, by pessimism, and it is difficult to talk of other things.'

Pier Paolo Pasolini:

'Truth lies not only in a dream, but in many dreams. '

'If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief. '

'When I make a film I'm always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.'

'The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.'

'We survive, in the confusion of a life reborn beyond reason'

'როგორ მინდა ანდრეი პლატონოვს ვგავდე, შერისხვის, სიღატაკისა და უბედურებათა უფსკრულის პირას მდგომიც რომ წერდა, აყრილი ჰქონდა შემოქმედებისა და არსებობის უფლება და მაინც წერდა: “დიდი საქმისთვის სულ ცოტა რამაა საკმარისი… ხანმოკლე, ჩვეულებრივი ადამიანური ცხოვრება სრულიად საკმარისია, რათა ყველა ჩანაფიქრი განახორციელო, ან ყველანაირ ვნებას გაუგო გემო. ვინც ამას ვერ ახერხებს, რაც არ უნდა ვადა გაუხანგრძლივო, მაინც ვერაფერს მოასწრებ'― Pier Paolo Pasolini

Rainer Werner Fassbinder:

'I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.'

'As long as movies are depressing, life isn't.'

'I hope to build a house with my films. Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.'

'The more real things get, the more like myths they become.'

' Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.'

Werner Herzog :

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet.

'I prefer to be alive, so I'm cautious about taking risks.'

'I'm not an interviewer. I have conversations.'

'I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.'

' I think the worst that can happen in filmmaking is if you're working with a storyboard. That kills all intuition, all fantasy, all creativity.'

'I work very fast and steadily, and I don't hardly ever notice that I'm working. It feels like just breathing or walking when I do films.'

The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man.'

'I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.'

'I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.'

Carl Theodor Dreyer:

'Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. 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.'

'You can't simplify reality without understanding it first.'

Ingmar Bergman:

'The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times, and create panic and terror. But I have learnt that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage.'

'I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.'

'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.'

'We always regret that we did not ask our parents more, really get to know them while they were alive.'

'I am extremely suspicious of dreams, apparitions and visions, both in literature and in films and plays. Perhaps it's because mental excesses of this sort smack too much of being 'arranged.'

'When you're as chaotic as I am, you need a very firm structure in your life.'

'Aging is not uncomplicated. Creativity is an extraordinary help against destructive demons.'

'People ask what are my intentions with my films - my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct.'

'Life wasn't about freeing up human souls. It was about creating obedient slaves in the hierarchical construction of the society - with God at the top, then the king and then the father.'

'The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.'

'If I didn't have my profession, I think I would be sitting in a nuthouse. But I have been unceasingly at work, and this has been very healthy for me. So I had no need for therapy.'

Roberto Rossellini:

'The camera's a ballpoint pen, an imbecile; it's not worth anything if you don't have anything to say.'

'Noble acts and momentous events happen in the same way and produce the same impression as the ordinary facts.'

Luchino Visconti:

I could make a film in front of a wall if I knew how to find the data of man's true humanity and how to express it.

'It seems that boredom is one of the greatest discoveries of our time. If so, there's no question but that he must be considered a pioneer.'

'I like melodrama because it is situated just at the meeting point between life and theater.'

Vittorio De Sica:

'Moral indignation in most cases is, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy.'

Bernardo Bertolucci:

'I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem'

'Sometimes you are in sync with the times, sometimes you are in advance, sometimes you are late.'

'I don't see my movies. When you ask me about one of my movies, it just goes in my memory because maybe sometimes I confuse one for another. I think all movies are like sequences, which is the body of my work.'

'I make movies in order to make things understood, not to be shocking.'

'If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.'

When I shoot, I try to feel the body and the face and the weight of the actor, because the character until that moment is only in the pages of the script. And very often, I pull from the life of my actors. I'm always curious about what these characters and these actors are hiding about their lives.