An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a color by contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematography

It's not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It's as simple as that. And I make films because I have not learned anything else. And I know that I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty, because this might be the inner-chronicle of what we are. And we have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

Werner Herzog
from Burden of Dreams

...shooting on location is fantastic because when you go into someone's real house, you can't believe it, what they've got in these houses and it gives you so many ideas.

David Lynch
from archival interview footage

...storytelling...is good enough for a film. When I sit down to write a script I never attempt to articulate my ideas in abstract terms through the veil of an ideology. My films come to me very much alive, like dreams without logical patterns or academic explanations. I will have a basic idea for a film and then over a period of time, when maybe I am driving or walking, it becomes clearer and clearer to me. I see the film before me, as if I were in a cinema. Soon it is so perfectly transparent that I can sit and write it all down. It is as if I were copying from a movie screen. I like to write fast because it gives the story a certain urgency. I leave out all unnecessary things and just go for it. A story written this way will have, for me at least, much more coherence and drive. And it will also be full of life. For these reasons it has never taken me longer than four or five days to write a script. I just sit in front of the typewriter or computer and pound the keys.

Whether I have an ideology is not something that I have ever given much thought to, though I do understand where the question might come from. People generally sense I am very well-oriented and know where I have come from, where I am standing now and where I am going. But it is not an ideology as most people think of the term. It is just that I understand the world in my own way and am capable of articulating this understanding into stories and images that seem to be coherent to others. Even after watching my films, it bothers some people that they still cannot put their finger on what my ideology might be. Please, take what I am saying with a pair of pliers, but let me tell you: ideology is simply the films themselves and my ability to make them. This is what scares those people who try so hard to analyze and criticize me and my work.

I have often spoke of what I call the inadequate imagery of today's civilzation. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious image the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn-out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.

...I have said this before and I will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adqequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. ...We need images in accordance with our civilization and our innermost conditioning, and this is the reason why I like any film that searches for new images no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. One must dig like an archaeologist and search our violated landscape to find anything new. It can sometimes be a struggle to find unprocessed and fresh images.

Werner Herzog
from Herzog on Herzog

Not have the soul of an executant (of my own projects). Find, for each shot, a new pungency over and above what I had imagined. Invention (re-invention) on the spot.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematography