It’s important to remember that the result is the screen, the silver screen on which we project shadows. The result isn’t performers acting out a story that is being filmed. Similarly, the result for a painter isn’t the landscape that inspires him. It’s a canvas with paint on it.
- Robert Bresson
To make films, it always begins with two words: what and how.
- Wong Kar-wai
A masterpiece only comes into being when the artist is totally sincere in his treatment of his material…An artist can not be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty. Art is the absolute form of the beautiful, of the perfected.
- Andrei Tarkovsky
Style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body.
- Jean-Luc Godard
I admire filmmakers who let the type of story dictate the cinematic style, dictate the mise-en-scène, dictate how they approach, how they capture, how they work.
- Ryan Coogler
Art is not a calling in itself but the way in which one exercises a calling, and also the way in which one performs any human activity. I will give you my definition of art: art is “making.”
- Jean Renoir
You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise, you’ll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.
- Francis Ford Coppola
At the level of expression, I borrowed the indirect, oblique manners of narrative in Melville…his ability to to use gazes, the body language of actors, the sheer weight of atmosphere, the meaningful presence, absence, and variation of light; all in all, his ability to speak without words.
- Kim Jee-woon
The cinema is the greatest means of expression ever invented, but it is an illusion more powerful than any other and should therefore be in the hands of the magicians and the wizards who could bring it to life.
- Martin Scorsese
Vigor comes from precision. Precision is vigorous. When I am working poorly, I am imprecise. Precision is another form of poetry.
- Robert Bresson
A masterpiece is a space closed in upon itself, not subject to either cooling or over-heating. Beauty is in the balance of the parts.
- Andrei Tarkovsky
The cinema I like is the one that stays in my soul. It imprints itself in my heart…I try to be honest, and there are films that are harder, due to their own needs, and there are films that are easier, thanks to their own dynamics. But you get in touch with them through their own theme.
- Claudia Llosa
It’s a miracle anytime you get a film made.
- Paul Thomas Anderson
I don’t have big dreams. I just want to be here in five years, breathing, and doing what I love to do. I just need to be free to tell my stories from my spirit, my heart, unrestricted. Life is fleeting. If we could be here doing what we love to do, that is success.
- Ava DuVernay
I always hope that if I do things the way I like, I will end up having respected the audience.
- Claire Denis
Sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the think of it, as in the feel of it.
- Stanley Kubrick
There is something that might be called cinematic beauty…When it is very well expressed, one experiences a particularly deep emotion while watching that film. I believe it is this quality that draws people to come and see a film, and that it is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the filmmaker to make his film in the first place. In other words, I believe that the essence of the cinema lies in cinematic beauty.
- Akira Kurosawa
You just have to have faith that as the work gets better, as the skills get better, somehow, not that the industry will come, but you will find your place. You will find a place to apply those skills, and I think, most importantly, be fulfilled both financially and spiritually in the work.
- Barry Jenkins