162 quotes found
"Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self."
"The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea."
"Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion."
"Fifty years after the October Revolution, the American industry rules cinema the world over. There is nothing much to add to this statement of fact. Except that on our own modest level we too should provoke two or three Vietnams in the bosom of the vast Hollywood-Cinecittá-Mosfilm-Pinewood-etc. empire, and, both economically and aesthetically, struggling on two fronts as it were, create cinemas which are national, free, brotherly, comradely and bonded in friendship."
"All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl."
"To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated."
"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."
"I would never see a good movie for the first time on television."
"[I think] the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera; the movie is the reality of the movie moving from reality to the camera."
"In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato!"
"To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema."
"American pictures usually have no subject, only a story. A pretty woman is not a subject. Julia Roberts doing this and that is not a subject."
"Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents."
"Film begins with D. W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami."
"She left me because of my many faults; I left her because I couldn’t talk movies with her."
"Zelensky's intervention at the Cannes festival goes without saying if you look at it from the angle of what is called "staging": a bad actor, a professional comedian, under the eye of other professionals in their own professions. I believe I must have said something along these lines a long time ago. It therefore took the staging of yet another world war and the threat of another catastrophe for us to know that Cannes is a propaganda tool like any other. They propagate Western aesthetics whilst thinking it is not a big deal, but it is just that. The truth of the images is only advancing slowly. Now imagine that the war itself is this aesthetic deployed during a world festival, whose stakeholders are the states in conflict, or rather “interests”, broadcasting representations of which we are all spectators for… you, like me. We often say “conflict of interest”, which is a tautology. There is no conflict, big or small, unless there is interest. Brutus, Nero, Biden, or Putin, Constantinople, Iraq or Ukraine, not much has changed, apart from the mass murder."
"A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end … but not necessarily in that order."
"In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make something. I always admire this. But I can't see his pictures. I sit for perhaps twenty-five or thirty or fifty minutes and then I have to leave, because his pictures make me so nervous. I have the feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don't understand what it is, and sometimes I have the feeling that he's bluffing, double-crossing me."
"I've never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He's made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin, féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mindnumbingly boring."
"As soon as we were happy, he tried to get at us by another means, another path. He provoked a new ordeal. One could have thought that it bored him, happiness."
"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film."
"This violence is a calm that disturbs you."
"But I would adore that thief who is my mother."
"If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!"
"I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face."
"By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste."
"Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life."
"To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance."
"Yet, what is their violence compared to mine, which was to accept theirs, to make it mine, to wish it for myself, to intercept it, to utilize it, to force it upon myself, to know it, to premeditate it, to discern and assume its perils? But what was mine, willed and necessary for my defense, my toughness, my rigor, compared to the violence they underwent like a malediction, risen from an inner fire simultaneously with an outer light which sets them ablaze and illuminates us?"
"But--criminals are remote from you--as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Thiers smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thristy soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil."
"With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable."
"Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me."
"So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies, but once having exposed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility."
"The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side."
"There has been talk about (The Blacks) revival. Angelou comments: "It was a very important play. It still is an important play. It implies that, come the revolution, Blacks will be as bad and as greedy as Whites have been. What goes around comes around, which is a very Black statement, an African statement, too. "Working for me as a young woman, with the cast of The Blacks, was an incredible experience. The original cast included Cecily (sic) Tyson, James Earl Jones, Raymond St. Jacques, Roscoe Lee Browne, Lou Gossett, Charles Gordone, Helen Martin, Cynthia Belgrave, Jay Flash Riley, Lex Monson, Godfrey Cambridge, Ethel Ayler, and me. It was the thing to go into; if you were out of a job, go try out for The Blacks. It was wonderful to break down the play together. Obviously it fed all our artistic growth. "It would be interesting to see it today with some new people. All the [original] actors have done so many things since [that they] would bring so much other equipment to it now. Just like the time-instead of 1960-61, 1977 has its own rhythm and its own impetus."
"Honest women are inconsolable for the mistakes they haven't made."
"You can pretend to be serious but you can't pretend to be witty."
"The little I know, I owe to my ignorance."
"When a man marries his mistress, he creates a job vacancy."
"When a man steals your wife there is no better revenge than to let him keep her."
"Michael, I know she’s a nice girl. She’s too bloody nice. She's supposed to be playing a bitch. Every day I have to make her into a bitch."
"It's weird. I always had the premonition that Sharon belonged to me just for a little while."
"She was the least hypocritical woman you could ever meet: once, when an executive told her that we should ask for single cabins in the transatlantic that brought us to the United States, she simply said, "Why? Everybody knows that we live together.""
"I'm forced to mix with people of this industry and I can swear that is really difficult to meet people with her nature and her spirit. Generally, everybody is opportunistic here. Sharon had grace and charm; she knew how to make anybody's life easier. When somebody was busy, she was there in a discreet manner to serve you a drink or a coffee."
"Without her I feel lost, I can't explain this in words. However there are things that I just can't stand thinking of; the way she and our son died."
"I don't know that you can speak of shock … Nothing is too shocking for me. I don't really know what is shocking. When you tell the story of a man who is beheaded, you have to show how they cut off his head. If you don't, it's like telling a dirty joke and leaving out the punch line."
"I see Macbeth as a young, open-faced warrior, who is gradually sucked into a whirpool of events because of his ambition. When he meets the weird sisters and hears their prophecy, he's like the man who hopes to win a million — a gamble for high stakes."
"It's easy to direct while acting — there’s one less person to argue with."
"If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!"
"You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity."
"I never made a film which fully satisfied me."
"I want people to go to the movies. I am the man of the spectacle. I'm playing."
"People like Truffaut, Lelouch and Godard are like little kids playing at being revolutionaries. I've passed through this stage. I lived in a country where these things happened seriously."
"In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent."
"I can only say that whatever my life and work have been, I'm not envious of anyone — and this is my biggest satisfaction."
"‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. She said her asthma was playing her up.… She was wheezing quite audibly by now. She picked up my towel and said, ‘I’d better rest awhile; otherwise I might pass out.’"
"We dried ourselves and each other. She said she was feeling better. Then, very gently, I began to kiss and caress her. After this had gone on for some time, I led her over to the couch."
"There was no doubt about Sandra's experience and lack of inhibition. She spread herself and I entered her. She wasn't unresponsive. Yet, when I asked her softly if she was liking it, she resorted to her favorite expression: ‘It’s all right.’"
"If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children."
"Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater."
"My films are the expression of momentary desires. I follow my instincts, but in a disciplined way."
"It's already getting more and more difficult to make an ambitious and original film. There are less and less independent producers or independent companies and an increasing number of corporations who are more interested in balance sheets than in artistic achievement. They want to make a killing each time they produce a film. They're only interested in the lowest common denominator because they're trying to reach the widest audience. And you got some kind of entropy. That's the danger; they look more alike, those films. The style is all melting and it all looks the same. Even young directors — for most of them, their only standard of achievement is how well their films do on the first weekend or whatever. It worries me. But then, from time to time, you have a film like The Usual Suspects or.... I'm trying to think of something American with some kind of originality... Pulp Fiction."
"You know, whenever you do something new and original, people run to see it because it's different. Then, if it happens to be successful, the studios rush to imitate it. It becomes commonplace right away. But it's been like that before, I think. Now, the stakes are so gigantic that they cut each other's throats. So if most of the films are failures, then those that succeed so spectacularly, so commercially, become the norm. It's like a roulette for the studios. The problem with it is that it becomes more and more of a committee. Before, you dealt with the studio. It had one or two persons and now you have masses of executives who have to justify their existence and write so-called "creative notes" and have creative meetings. They obsess about the word creative probably because they aren't."
"Berlin was great. It’s a new generation. If you continue to hate, you are entering into the same philosophy that began the war. You have to look forward at people and new times."
"Whenever I get happy, I always have a terrible feeling."
"33 years ago I pleaded guilty, and I served time at the prison for common law crimes at Chino, not in a VIP prison. That period was to have covered the totality of my sentence. By the time I left prison, the judge had changed his mind and claimed that the time served at Chino did not fulfil the entire sentence, and it is this reversal that justified my leaving the United States."
"On February 26 last, Roger Gunson, the deputy district attorney in charge of the case in 1977, now retired, testified under oath before Judge Mary Lou Villar in the presence of David Walgren, the present deputy district attorney in charge of the case, who was at liberty to contradict and question him, that on September 16, 1977, Judge Rittenband stated to all the parties concerned that my term of imprisonment in Chino constituted the totality of the sentence I would have to serve."
"Gunson added that it was false to claim, as the present district attorney’s office does in their request for my extradition, that the time I spent in Chino was for the purpose of a diagnostic study."
"Oh, the little man wanted me—Roman Polanski. Very dwarfish creature with a high giggle. After a take, he wouldn't say, "Cut." One would just hear a "Tee hee hee." [...] Roman presented everything in [such] a calm, matter-of-fact way that the creeping terror just builds. It's sheer genius on his part. It's a very quiet movie where a door creaking can unnerve one. There's a lot of dark comedy in there, too. he was a very careful director—explained everything, multiple takes, very demanding, very appreciative when one got it right. Loved to talk old movies with me."
"The probation officers quoted a pair of psychiatrists as saying that Mr. Polanski was not “a pedophile” or a “sexual deviate.”"
"I would rather live in a country where children are protected and their predators prosecuted, and even (which in Hollywood is evidently not always the same thing) disapproved of."
"He sees things from every point of view. He's an extraordinarily hard worker. I think he's worked for a long time, in every field. He's talented, passionate and has had an incredibly hard and full life that I'm sure you know about. I can not imagine myself having some of his experiences. You either swim or drown, but some like him go on and make every moment important. I think that's what he does."
"Our father who art in heaven Stay there And we will stay here on earth Which is sometimes so pretty"
"An orange on the table Your robe on the carpet And you in my bed Sweet present of the present Coolness of the night Warmth of my life."
"It's terrible the faint sound of a hard boiled egg firmly cracked on a tin counter it's terrible this faint sound when it stirs the memory of a starving man"
"I am what I am I was made this way When I want to laugh Yes I shriek with laughter I love those who love me It's my fault If they're not the same That I love everytime I am what I am I was made this way What more do you want What do you want from me"
"Il y aura toujours un chien perdu quelque part qui m'empêchera d'être heureux."
"Mourir, ce n'est rien. Commence donc par vivre. C'est moins drôle et c'est plus long."
"On ne peut pleurer pour le monde entier : C'est au-delà des forces humaines. Il faut choisir !"
"When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past — and when you're seventy, nearly all of you."
"Have you noticed that life, real honest to goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?”"
"It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him."
"It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most."
"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate."
"Ce qui remplit le temps c'est vraiment de le perdre."
"Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it."
"Alcohol doesn’t console, it doesn’t fill up anyone’s psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn’t comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny."
"Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it."
"Writing is not speaking. It's silencing yourself. It's screaming without noise."
"There is no vacation from love, it doesn't exist. Love, you must live it fully, with its boredom and all, there is no possible vacation from that."
"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."
"Obviously I think I've been very lucky, to start off with such a good break, and to have a film that not only was a hit but where I didn't have to compromise … in terms of doing a mindless movie — it was also a movie, for me as an actor which was very fulfilling…"
"I wanted to kind of make sure that people know that I'm here to stay, because this is home, and I am born here — I'm not a foreigner in that sense."
"I think the chemistry we have is that we both think very dark when it comes to stories."
"It's all a part of this world where we're all kind of mixing a lot, and… in that way we're all a bit confused about who we are, where we belong, where's home, and … who is important to us…"
"Enter Chanda, the multilingual call girl who can seduce in Hindi, Tamil, English and French. With her bee-stung lips, unusual face and refreshing lack of acting guile, Kalki Koechlin imbues the part with a touching fragility."
"Dev.D is a tryst with milestone cinema, reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann's Shakespeare-shaken-and-stirred in Romeo and Juliet. Kashyap, however, gets even more adventurous and adds a progressive flourish to both the plot and the characters which are played to perfection by the three lead players. If Mahi and Kalki are riveting new finds, assured of a long innings in cinema, then Abhay Deol adds a whole new meaning to the term "Unconventional Hero"."
"The clown company played by Atul Kumar, Kalki Koechlin, Sujay Saple, Neil Bhoopalam, Namit Das and Puja Sarup are outstanding in their role[s]. This is just outstanding casting by the director and The Company Theatre."
"Love is worth whatever it costs."
"For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary."
"I don’t search for exactitude in portraying people. I try to give to imaginary people a kind of veracity. It would bore me to death to put into my novels the people I know. It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the “fronts” people assume before one another’s eyes, and the “front” a writer puts on the face of reality."
"Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the “real” as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called “realist” novels — they’re nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth — the true feeling of a character — that is all."
"Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal."
"I never make moral judgments. All I would say is that a person was droll, or gay, or, above all, a bore. Making judgments for or against my characters bores me enormously; it doesn’t interest me at all. The only morality for a novelist is the morality of his esthétique."
"Very broadly, I think one writes and rewrites the same book. I lead a character from book to book, I continue along with the same ideas. Only the angle of vision, the method, the lighting, change."
"Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little — oh, I admit only a very little — of what life is about."
"No one, but no one, ever behaves "well" in bed unless they love or are loved — two conditions seldom fulfilled."
""One must cherish one's effigies, if one can tolerate them, perhaps more lovingly than one cherishes one's intrinsic self." That's the ABC of pride. And of humor."
"The ways of love are all the same, whether infantile, childish, sexual, tender, sadistic, erotic, or whispered. It's simply a question of understanding, of understanding oneself above all: in bed, in broad daylight, madly or not at all, in shadow, in sunlight, in despair or at table. Otherwise, it's no use. Any of it. And the little time we have left for living, while we're still alive, in other words capable of giving pleasure, and the little time we have left for thinking (or pretending to) in this vast, mindless cacophony that daily life has become, ineluctable, uncontrollable, and truly unacceptable to any civilized person, we must make absolutely certain that we share."
"Just because life is inelegant doesn't mean we have to behave likewise."
"One is never free except in relation to someone else. And when, the relation is based on happiness, it allows the greatest freedom in the world."
"Lying stimulates one's imagination and ingenuity."
"Desire, even the basest, kind, required the notion of futurity if it was ever to come off. A man without a future, a dying man, was no longer desirable. And however stupid such a reaction might have seemed, Paul knew that if the situation was ever reversed, he would feel the same way about the woman. Desire would have turned into compassion. Which is tantamount to saying that desire would vanish into thin air."
"Paul had always thought that women were never more serious than when they were naked."
"Could you love a woman you didn't respect? Could you worship someone without believeing in her? Could you be madly in love with a woman you didn't admire? Well, you could. Not only that, it might be better that way. Easier. It took Paul almost forty years to learn that carnal platitude. Nevertheless, he always took Sonia to dinners where, sooner or later, her stupidity would explode, with the result that brighter souls would inevitably pick up on it right away and cast a sympathetic, albeit ironical, look in his direction, which only excited him all the more."
"It's not doubt that drives people crazy, it's certainty that does."
"The fact that a woman you love reaches a point in the relationship where she ceases to love you, and despite that you can never bring yourself to scorn or despise her, is very rare indeed."
"Women believed in death. Without exception. It was part of their makeup. Whereas men refused to face up to it. Not only death, in fact, but life, too: a man, learning that his wife or girlfriend is pregnant, reacts like some beast of the field - "I can't believe it's true!" - while women look at the same situation as either happy news or a momentary inconvenience."
"It is healthier to see the good points of others than to analyze our own bad ones."
"We always want someone we've treated badly to be gay. It's less upsetting."
"Jazz music is a form of accelerated unconcern."
"I can say everything to you. It's a wonderful feeling. I never could tell Francoise that I don't really love her, that our marriage isn't based on any hones ideal. It's founded on my weariness and boredom. Although those are solid enough bases. Plenty of lasting marriages are build on them, God knows. At least, they're always present."
"She'd like to be indispensable; that's what every woman wants..."
"Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull."
"When a man has dreamed of winning something by a colossal stroke of luck, he is prone to neglect petty but more practical ways of attaining it."
"No one ever has time to examine himself honestly, and most people look no further than their neighbors' eyes, in which they may see their own reflection."
"Passion is the salt of life, and that at the times when we are under its spell this salt is indispensable to us, even if we have got along very well without it before."
"Curiosity is the beginning of all wisdom."
"In love, as in finance, only the rich can get credit."
"No one is more conventional than a woman who is falling out of love."
"Edouard was trying to understand, to find out what he could have done to lose Beatrice's favor. He couldn't know that his unpardonable sin was the fact that he was too deserving."
"Unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly."
"She clearly does not enjoy being interviewed or asked to articulate in a formal way what are, to her, natural assumptions about her writing. She is sincere and helpful, but questions that are pompous or elaborate, or about personal life, or that might be interpreted as challenging her work, are liable to elicit only a simple “oui” or “non,” or “je ne sais pas— je ne sais pas du tout” — and then an amused, disconcerting smile."
"Her life was like a whirlwind... Generous, inspired, quick, rebellious, unclassifiable, inimitable... We loved Sagan, even if we had not read her books or no longer read them … Sagan was more than just Sagan, more than a writing phenomenon: a writer, a woman, an era. …She rushed through her life and her books at full speed, without ever taking herself seriously."
"She almost succeeded in inspiring the creation of the adjective 'saganesque', which one might translate as nostalgic and funny, deceptively frivolous and very lucid."
"I think there are three qualities that people believe are weaknesses, but which I believe are strengths, particularly for a filmmaker: paranoia, megalomania and mental contagion."
"This film is extremely visual. It is difficult to describe in words without running the risk of losing or boring the reader. I have come up with a simplified summary, therefore, like a readers guide, which will conjure up the images in as few words as possible :"
"You no trouble. Me... Fifth element... supreme being... me protect you."
"You humans act so strange. Everything you create is used to destroy."
"Life was given to us a billion years ago. What have we done with it?"
"Learning's always a painful process."
"I AM EVERYWHERE"
""I would rather stop too soon than too late." - Interview for The Guardian (2011)"
""The most difficult part of filmmaking, is the need for directors to find a balance between being sensitive and being the leader." - Interview for The Hollywoodreporter (2017)"
"“If you’re a race runner, and you run, and progress, and you have the feeling that, yeah, you’re pretty good. You watch your time, and every week you make it better, and there’s a certain moment that you feel that maybe you can go to the Olympic games because you feel good. And then you watch TV and you see Usain Bolt. And then you say, ‘I’m not going to go this year, I’m going in four years’. - Interview for The Alarabiya (2017)"
""The most important thing is always the story. Then come the actors." - Interview for The Cinema (2018)"
""I love the fantasy and it’s so enjoyable and so funny and fresh. You can reinvent everything and yeah, it’s very enjoyable." - Interview for The Denofgeek (2018)"
"“I like to start on time because I love to let the people go on time because they have families. They have kids and I don’t want to abuse them for 2 hours. - Interview for The Cinemovie (2017)"
"When you're watching sci-fi today, driven ninety percent by Marvel and DC Comics, there's feeling, there's a pattern, there's a thing, and then we get used to it. - Interview for The Slashfilm 92017)"
"If you find the actress or the actor who is perfect for the role, that’s unbeatable. If you choose someone because he’s known or because you think he’s going to make money or things, three years later, you never know. - Interview for The Thriftyjinxy (2017)"
"You know, money will never save anyone. Compassion can save someone, love can save someone, money will never save anyone. And as long as the entire society will put money first... Money should be like third or fourth or fifth, I'm not saying lets get rid of money, but how can we put money as number one? As the only value, like if you are rich, you're famous you go VIP, why? It's just insane, the way we've transformed the society. - Interview for The Huffpost (2017)"
"Loving a film is like falling in love with a woman or with a man like you never expect it. It's not the one you think you will be in love with, you know. You think always that he will be with a beard, and black, and big and finally he's Chinese and you know it's the same thing. There's something very organic about the film and if you forgot it, if you don't have this seed in it...this organic flavor in it the film doesn't work it's wrong. - Interview for The Collider (2016)"
"Sometimes I see people finish a film and they go, "Yeah, that was good. Where are we going to eat?" - Interview for The Slashfilm (2016)"
"The last scene came really, really early, disconnected from even the idea of a woman painter…I wanted to write a love story and I thought, ‘What do I want to tell?’ And that scene came up really, really quickly, alone, by itself. The weird compass of the film was its last scene. That’s a compass, but it’s a high pressure one."
"We want people to have their heart broken and think about themselves, but enjoy this experience of this strong love story...But it’s also about the memory of a love story. It’s a lot about the present, the rise of desire, but it’s also about what’s left of a love story. What’s the memory of a love story. There’s these two timelines that sometimes are contiguous, contaminating one another. We are trying to propose another politic of love where it’s not about possession or donation or eternal love or death or eternity or whatever. It’s more about love as a dynamic that can only grow."
"It's a very bourgeois industry. There's resistance to radicalism, and also less youth in charge. "A film can be feminist?" They don't know this concept. They don't read the book. They don't even know about the fact that "male gaze" exists. You can tell it's a country where there’s a lot of sexism, and a strong culture of patriarchy."
"We call models "muses", and that's mostly what's left in the history of art for women artists...Dora Maar was the muse of Picasso but also a photographer at the centre of the surrealist scene. And |Gabrièle Picabia was the wife of [avant-garde painter [[w:Francis Picabia||Francis] Picabia]] but also the brain of his work. It's about co-creation, not this fetishised, silent woman standing there beautiful and mute"
"A few weeks ago I went to a screening of 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' at Utopia. I'm not a very introspective person but when I get on that stage, it feels even more overwhelming than showing my films at the Cannes film festival. Because standing there, I'm so close to my past. I can see how far I've come."
"I'm not saying that you have to love it all. [...] But, yes, you should love it all."
"In our enigmatic and often difficult relationships with the world, Buddhism offers a vocabulary, a certain number of conceptual and operational tools which allow us to dialogue. And this in very current areas such as overpopulation, ecology, conflict resolution, the role of modern science and its understanding. In more speculative areas, it also provides us with approaches, relations, always very practical, concerning questions about death, fear, suffering. Our traditions don't always have the answers, or perhaps they have become muddled..."
"Without a doubt, by his personality, at once warm, deep, laughing and obstinate, as well as by the exceptional events which made up his life, he largely influenced the development of Buddhism as a whole in the 20th century, making it clearer, more accessible, closer to humanity. Not knowing if his political fight will achieve the goal he seeks, he lives in the movement, and in the consciousness of this movement. He accepts the idea that he may be the last Dalai Lama. If, one day, the Tibetan people no longer want this institution, he will retire, he says, to a convent, without any possessions, to end his days there like an old monk bent over his staff. And in the end, he adds with a laugh, maybe it’s not bad."