Raoul Peck Quotes

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

But actually I make films that I think are extremely sophisticated and cinematic.

I don't want to be an art-house movie guy, where people who go to film school can discuss your work, but people who haven't studied cinema can't appreciate it. By the same token, I don't want to be the guy who's making this commercial pap that people lap up but that disappears the minute you leave the theater.

I think the form, the Hollywood movie, I think the quality is obviously always going to be there and I think that the question of taste, there's always a question of taste.

I want to make it clear: it's not that I hate mainstream cinema. It's perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult situations, so they have the right to escape from the world. But this has nothing to do with an art form.

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers.

When you're actually making the film, you're constantly battling to maintain its integrity.

My films start with images, a few images and a few feelings, and I try to edit them together to see the correspondence between these images and these feelings.

I definitely promise to always make films about issues that matter to me.

No one sets out to make a bad movie or disappoint anybody.

No film should be meaningless.

I make commercial films only. I don't make small, boring films.

It could be sci-fi, love story, historical drama what counts for me is the fact that they're made by great directors with a great point of view who bring the audience to be elevated and at the same time entertained. That's what cinema is.

This politics is bound to be reflected in the work of a serious filmmaker. When I make a film, I try to tell a human story to the best of my ability. I do not set out either to preach messages or purely to entertain.

Peak TV has resulted in beautiful shows that have nothing in particular to tell us about humanity.

I'm not very particular about the commercial angle in my films, but entertainment is very important.

We try our best every time to make engaging films that we're interested in, and we just hope the rest of the world likes them.

You can't make a film for your personal satisfaction. That is why I detest the cinema of people like Mani Kaul.

What I like to do with every film is to bring a form, like a cinematographic proposal. If you watch 'S21,' it's a form; 'Duch, Master of the Gates of Hell' is a different proposal.

I want to do films that provide entertainment, but are also content-driven.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.

I want to make sensible commercial films.

If you look at the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on 'Titanic,' you ask yourself, why on earth would they turn to stock footage? The answer is simple, many scenes used for the narrative of the film don't need to be expensively shot and can be bought from us.

'The Lobster,' at some point, was my most accessible film. Then I made 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer,' which turned out to be not as accessible as 'The Lobster.' It was the film I wanted to make and the story I wanted to tell.

I am thankful for the fact that the audience doesn't expect common, run-of-the-mill films from me. But the fact of the matter is that if the subject doesn't hit me hard enough, I will not do it.