The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

A film is a ribbon of dreams. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins.

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought." ~ Jean Cocteau

The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all, that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open, has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.

"American motion pictures are written by the half-educated for the half-witted." ~ St. John Ervine

"A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad." ~ Samuel Goldwyn