To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

The reason I started making films, originally, was that I would see pictures in my head. I had these visions, which I felt compelled to translate through a camera. And I guess that's as good a reason as any to start making films. Today, however, it's totally different: I don't really have pictures in my head anymore, and making films has actually become a way for me to create these images. It's not my reason for making films that has changed but my approach to making them. I still see images, but they're abstract images, as opposed to before, when they were very concrete. I don't know how it happened; I think it's just a consequence of getting older, of maturing. I guess when you are younger, filmmaking is all about ideas and ideals, but then, as you get older, you start thinking more about life and have a different approach to your work, and that's what caused the change.

In spite of that, I have to say that to me, filmmaking has always been about emotions. What I notice about the great directors I admire is that if you show me five minutes of one of their films, I will know it is theirs. And even though most of my films are very different, I think I can claim the same thing, and I think it is the emotion that ties it all together.

In any case, I never set out to make a film to express a particular idea. I understand how one could see it that way with my first films, because they can appear a little cold and mathematical, but even then, deep down, it was always about emotions for me. The reason that the films I make today might appear stronger, emotionally speaking, is just that, as a person, I think I've become a better conveyor of emotions.

Lars von Trier
from Moviemakers' Master Class by Laurent Tirard

A lot of people think documentaries are truer than fiction, and it’s not necessarily the fact. Often you have to make something up to get to the truth. It’s sort of an odd thing but I think that’s what it is.

Trent Harris
from an interview with William Becton (2001)

Art is emotion. Therefore, the use of film, I say, putting it together and making it have an effect on an audience is, I think, the main function of film. Certainly if you take dialogue in a film, truly you are only borrowing from the theatre, which is what as I have often said, most pictures you see are photographs of people talking.

...Please don't think me presumptuous if I give you, say, the analogy of, say, a painter who paints a tree, a landscape or even a bowl of fruit. I'm sure that the painter is not a bit interested in the apples for themselves alone but in the technique of his work, which stimulates the emotion of the viewer of his picture. After all, all art is experience. People look at an abstract and say, "I hate it." Well, the mere fact that they're using the word "hate" means that they're going through an experience, you see?...

Therefore, if you apply these principles to film, as I see it, it is not the pure manner of the content. In other words: it's not the story, it's what you do with it. How. And therefore, I find that with many people, they look at a film and they look at its content only and never seem to study (I'm talking about the critical faculty) what was there in the film to make an audience go through these various emotions that you put them through, especially in my field which is thrill or suspense or what have you.

Sometimes one can almost say that the man who builds a roller coaster is an artist because the grades and dives as he puts into it create the crudest and broadest emotions in the rider.

Alfred Hitchcock
from Telescope: An Interview with Fletcher Markle

Very often you find a deeper truth by fabrication. It's not that just following the surface events will ever give you access to truth. It comes through imagination. It comes through other things. It's very strange and very elusive and one of the major questions that, of course, everyone will encounter who makes films. Sooner or later you will come across this question.

Werner Herzog
from Cobra Verde audio commentary

Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

One of the things I think I said in (an) interview was that I thought Ionesco’s essays about playwriting were really essays about film editing. I remember that it was comforting to me that some of the things that he wrote about how he constructed his plays were precisely elaborations about the issues I was confronted with in editing the movies. And the experience of being at the place and shooting the film, rather than trying to figure out in advance what the themes were to be. The associational issues that he dealt with as he was writing plays just spoke to me.

It was technical issues of construction, and a relationship between how he was constructing his plays and the way I was trying to construct my movies. It didn’t, say, solve a problem in the editing of Welfare, but it made me comfortable with the way I was proceeding to try and solve the problems, knowing that somebody I admired was dealing with similar problems. It was like having a good conversation with a more experienced person about issues that concern me.

I don’t even particularly want to summarize (one of my films) because if I could summarize it in 25 words or less I shouldn’t have made the movie. But it’s the idea of creating a feeling that the sum of the parts adds up to more than the specific encounters.

Frederick Wiseman
from an interview with Nicolas Rapold (2008)