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When you look at Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese, they are obsessed by viewing films. They see one film after the other. And it's the joy of their lives and their points of reference. In my case, it's kind of different. I see maybe three or four films a year. Probably less than the average moviegoer.

I love movies, but it's odd that some of the great highlights of film history I've never seen. I've never seen Gone With the Wind, I've never seen Metropolis.

Werner Herzog

from an article in The Wall Street Journal (read full)

JAY LENO: Now the movie (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) was very loud, I noticed. It seemed louder than normal.

LYNCH: It's important that a film is loud, and I hope many people agree. You should be inside of a film when you go into a theatre, it shouldn't be way up in front of you and it should surround you, envelop you so you can live inside a dream. And that's the way it should be, in my opinion.

David Lynch

from an interview with Jay Leno (1992)

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GODARD: And if you could replace all the images by sounds? I mean...I am thinking of a kind of inversion of the functions of the image and of the sound. One could have the images, of course, but it would be the sound that would be the significant element.

BRESSON: As to that, it is true that the ear is much more creative than the eye. The eye is lazy; the ear, on the contrary, invents. In any case, it is much more attentive, while the eye is content to receive-except in the rare cases when it invents, but then in fantasy. The ear is a much deeper sense, and very evocative. The whistle of a locomotive, for example, can evoke, imprint in you the vision of an entire railroad station, sometimes of a specific station that you know, sometimes of the atmosphere of a station, or of a railroad track, with a train stopped....The possible evoications are innumberable. What is good, too, with sound is that leaves the spectator free. And it is towards that that we should tend - to leave the spectator as free as possible.

Jean-Luc Godard & Robert Bresson

from an interview in Cahiers du cinema, 1967

as translated in Robert Bresson [ed. James Quandt]

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I don't really have contempt for the word. I have contempt when the word is used as the glue of something, ya know, which is happened in theatre and a lot in film. I really don't like it, that the word...that one has to sit and listen to words all the time when really, all the other faculties are not being used. That I really don't like. I mean, I think the word has its own beauty and also should have its own integrity, stand alone just as much as any of the other elements...

Meredith Monk

from Four American Composers (Peter Greenaway, 1983)

Note: In addition to being a modern composer, Monk is also a filmmaker.

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Little plots and stories, acted out and screened, can't possibly be called cinema. They have nothing whatever to do with cinema. A cinematographic work is above all a work which would not be possible in any other art form. In other words, it can be created by means of cinema, and cinema alone.

Andrei Tarkovsky

from Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986 (01.23.1973)

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SS: I've tried as I've gone on in my career to never, if possible, tell an actor what to think. I've become much more convinced that it's much better to tell them something to do.

LK: Yeah, I agree. Or a situation that they're in.

SS: Yeah, but never to get into, sort of the psychology of it. Something physical to give them is always good.

LK: When you get a good performance, it's a real synergy between the director and the actor. And it's almost like a chemical reaction on some level. But I think that the more I make films, the more I just try to keep it simple and too the point and not over talk stuff and not over analyze it and just present it and create a framework where people can do their own work but where everything is clear, where the character is clear, and the choices to be made, emotional choices, are clear. And I actually spend a lot of my rehearsal time focusing on that now, and it's come to a point where I don't worry about the actual performance itself 'till the day of the shoot and that's when it's really exhilarating.

Lodge Kerrigan & Steven Soderbergh

from Criterion's Clean, Shaven audio commentary