Filmmakers

“I think a good film is one that has a lasting power and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theatre.”

“I think a good film is one that has a lasting power and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theatre. There are a lot of films that seem to be very good but you forget them the minute you leave the theatre. Other films grow inside you.”

“If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes. If we opened me up, we'd find beaches.”

“To be an artist means to search for, find, and look at these realities. To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.”

“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”

“Az emberek menekülni akarnak. Ez a nagy emberi vágy.”

“People want to escape. That is the great human desire — escape from here, from now, from this body, from this life. But my films say: there is no escape. There is only endurance. And the dignity of enduring without illusion.”

“I'm a very selfish filmmaker. I make films for me. And then I share them with the audience.”

“Compassion is the breakdown of all the barriers between us. A heart-to-heart bonding. Your pain is my pain. It's mingled and shared between us.”

“Rien ne distingue les souvenirs des autres moments: ce n'est que plus tard qu'ils se font reconnaître, à leurs cicatrices.”

“Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance, on account of their scars. That face which just appeared in the viewfinder — was it already a memory when I saw it, or did it become one only now that I recall it?”

“I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.”

“I love to put the audience in a state of dreaming. I want people to come out of the movie theatre and feel like they need to readjust to reality.”

“你越想用理性解释一切，你对真实生活的理解就越少。”

“The more you try to explain everything with reason, the less you understand about real life.”

“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.”

“An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal — falling like a cat, moving like a fox, holding still like a snake.”

“I would like to make a film to tell children "it's good to be alive."”

“我觉得电影不应该解释自己。人们需要自己去探索、去感受它在讲什么。”

“I feel that a movie shouldn't explain itself. People have to search, to feel what it's about.”

“No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.”

“Cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”

“I'm interested in what's inside people. I want to photograph what can't be photographed — what's between people, what it means when they look at each other.”

“I find that the only way to get through life is to have principles — and then break them.”

“The most personal is the most creative.”

“In my films I always wanted to make people react. I've always wanted my characters to be free, to be able to talk about everything.”

“Io sono una forza del Passato. Solo nella tradizione è il mio amore.”

“I am a force of the past. My love lies only with tradition. I come from the ruins, the churches, the altarpieces, the forgotten villages where brothers lived with the simplicity that gave every gesture the weight of the sacred.”

“The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.”

“I just wanted to make a film that gave you the experience of living, more than telling you a story.”

“Η εξορία δεν είναι απλά να φεύγεις από τη χώρα σου.”

“Exile is not simply leaving your country. It is the moment when you realize that the country you left no longer exists, and the country you arrive in will never be yours. You are suspended between two absences.”

“I am someone who takes footsteps very seriously.”

“Any image can be a beginning.”

“我们都有失恋的时候。失恋的时候我就去跑步，跑步的时候身体在出水，就没有多余的水分流泪了。”

“We are all unlucky in love sometimes. When I am, I go jogging. The body loses water when you jog, so you have none left for tears.”

“人間の表面だけを撮ろうとしているが、その表面の最も深い層には、かなり普遍的なものがある。”

“I try to depict only the surface of human beings. But in the deepest layer of that surface is something quite universal.”