“I'm not coming from film school. I learned cinema in the cinema watching films, so you always have a curiosity. I say, 'Well, what if I make a film in this genre? What if I make this film like this'”
― Wong Kar Wai
“Love is all a matter of timing. It's no good meeting the right person too soon or too late.”
― Wong Kar Wai
"Cinema is my home. I think I’ve always lived in it.”
― Agnès Varda
“Yeah, anything could be art. Anything could be beauty. (...) And that's turning life into - you know, finding not only beauty - amusement, joy, fun. Finding fun where sometimes it's just a bore; finding fun when it's a burden. You can always make something look different. Which is a way of saying that I'm, in a way, protected from being unhappy.”
― Agnes Varda, Agnes Varda: Interviews
“They always want us to tell stories with action and psychological drama but there are other very interesting directions we can take in time, space, and memory. Emotions, recollections, surprises.”
― Agnes Varda, Agnes Varda: Interviews
"Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second."
― Jean-Luc Godard
"More or less, I am always saying, 'Let's do what has not been done."
― Jean-Luc Godard
“To feel. To trust the feeling. I long for that”
― Ingmar Bergman, Face to Face: A Film
“I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.”
― Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film
“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.”
― Ingmar Bergman
“Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
“Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
“Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
"The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls."
― Maya Deren
"Art is actually based on the notion that if you would really celebrate an idea or a principle, you must think, you must plan, you must put yourself completely in the state of devotion, and not simply give the first thing that comes to your head."
― Maya Deren
"Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away."
― Frida Kahlo
"I am that clumsy human, always loving, loving, loving. And loving. And never leaving."
― Frida Kahlo
“In a mad world, only the mad are sane.”
― Akira Kurosawa
“I like silent pictures and I always have ... I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film.”
― Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon)
“For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography