Be yourself. Find your style, your way. Find the border, and cross it, or else you may be lost or, even worse, boring. Don’t forget what you really want to say. There is no recipe. The recipe is you.
- Béla Tarr
Filmmaking Wisdom from Ava DuVernay
The energy with which a film is made is felt by the audience. You can tell what is made with joy, passion, with the spirit.
- Ava DuVernay
Filmmaking Wisdom from Orson Welles
I think the enemy of film is of course reality, and films are best when they manage poetry by reducing the element of reality and introducing something which is the invention of the filmmaker.
- Orson Welles
Filmmaking Wisdom from Andrei Tarkovsky
We’ve reached a time when we must declare open warfare on mediocrity, grayness, and lack of expressiveness, and make creative inquiry a rule in cinema.
- Andrei Tarkovsky
Filmmaking Wisdom from Claire Denis
The cinema gives pleasure, certainly. But, most of all for me, filmmaking is a journey into the impossible. When I make a film I have to be like a military commander, in charge of every strategy and tactic, but I never really know where we are going. But, of course, I can never let anyone know this.
- Claire Denis
Filmmaking Wisdom from Robert Bresson
The future of cinema is to a new race of young solitaires who will shoot films by putting their last cent into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade.
- Robert Bresson
Filmmaking Wisdom from Lynne Ramsay
A good film has to tell a good story, but, more than that, it has to know how to manipulate the language of cinema…I like to push the forms of visual expression to their limit.
- Lynne Ramsay
Filmmaking Wisdom from Nuri Bilge Ceylan
The only thing I know about filmmaking is there is no formula at all…When you start a film, you always start as a student, as if you are shooting your first movie.
- Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Filmmaking Wisdom from David Lynch
Be true to the ideas, let them talk to you, and worry about every little frame that you’re making, and if you don’t have the money, you can find another way to get that same thing, so you don’t have to compromise in that way, for the final thing. You can find a way.
- David Lynch
Filmmaking Wisdom from Robert Bresson
Master precision. Be a precision instrument myself.
- Robert Bresson
Filmmaking Wisdom from Andrei Tarkovsky
I believe only poets will remain in the history of cinema. I think there exists a law: auteur cinema is made of poets, and all great directors are poets. And what is a poet in cinema? He is a director who creates his own world without reproducing the reality around him. That is what we call “auteur cinema.”
- Andrei Tarkovsky
Filmmaking Wisdom from Agnès Varda
A film is not written by the screenplay or the dialogue…It’s written by the way of the filming, the choices that you have to make between still shot or traveling shot, color or black-and-white, speedy way of acting or slow-motion…All these choices, and the lens you choose, and the camera you choose, and then the editing, and then the music or not, and the mixing—all these choices all the way through the film.
- Agnès Varda
Filmmaking Wisdom from Pedro Costa
I always say I have to wear two caps all the time: I have to contribute to do the best film I can and I have to make a stand for our way of working, to keep reaffirming, film after film, that is is possible for cinema to exist on these terms and conditions.
- Pedro Costa
Filmmaking Wisdom from Martin Scorsese
I’m often asked by younger filmmakers, “Why do I need to look at old movies?”…The response I find that I have to give them is that I still consider myself a student. The more pictures I’ve made in the past twenty years the more I realize I really don’t know. And I’m always looking for something to, something or someone that I could learn from…I tell the younger filmmakers and the young students that I do it like painters used to do, or painters do: study the old masters, enrich your palette, expand your canvas. There’s always so much more to learn.
- Martin Scorsese
Filmmaking Wisdom from Céline Sciamma
I’m always trying to make a film that could be somebody’s favorite film…a film that you carry with you, that you still want to live in. You’re not leaving the film in the room. And I think also what I want people to have with them is themselves.
- Céline Sciamma
Filmmaking Wisdom from Ingmar Bergman
I create things that are meant to be useful…I have never created for the sake of eternity.
- Ingmar Bergman
Filmmaking Wisdom from Maya Deren
The most important part of your equipment is yourself: your mobile body, your imaginative mind, and your freedom to use both. Make sure you do use them.
- Maya Deren
Filmmaking Wisdom from Ritwik Ghatak
I consider filmmaking, to start with, a personal thing. If a person does not have a vision of his own, he can not create.
- Ritwik Ghatak