film-producers-from-france

"I never point a finger. If we reach people's brains and hearts and we try to come up with ideas, we can help them go in a direction which will solve a lot of the problems we've created. And you know, then again, whether it's in government or industries, these people have families and they care. They want to do the right thing, but we need to help. And thanks to science and new technologies, we can make that happen."

"Jean-Michel Cousteau said he thinks whales are like a living, breathing planet–each one. I love that he said that. I’d thought he’d be a great photographer and a good guy, but he’s also very poetic in how he sees the world"

"Everybody needs to understand when you drink a glass of water you’re drinking the ocean. There’s only one water system. If you go up in the Alps or wherever on top of the mountains to go skiing, you’re skiing on the ocean. That water system is life for every plant, every animal, and we need to manage it like a business. We need to make sure it’s not polluted and we need to stop using the ocean ultimately as a universal sewer."

"Too often people think education is boring. Well, it’s not boring! And particularly, if you have people who can communicate with you and also, sometimes, information that experts can provide you. That’s why I always go with biologists or people who can educate me. I want to be educated all the time."

"[T]here was a whole bunch of elaborated ideas from Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the story that led to the movie, and that stuff was so interesting to me that eventually I was like, you know what? I'd like to take a look at what happened before the movie. It's such a big canvas that it might not even be a movie, it might be a series."

"This weird UFO of a movie that didn't belong in the Eighties. It was ahead of its time and a little bit obsolete at the same time because it was done with puppets."

"The Dark Crystal is a movie I saw a little too young, it shocked me a little bit and never left my mind."

"When you're not working and you're just living, you forget and all of a sudden something happens to remind you that you're an actor. I'm not always the nicest person to meet, because I forget very easily that I'm an actress when I'm not working. I live very normally, I go out with my friends, we go to the movies, I queue, we go to restaurants. Then if something happens to remind me that I'm an actress then I become a little different and things become a little heavy. I like the advantages; I know it's not right but I like being famous when it's convenient for me and completely anonymous when it's not."

"We need to serve the fans. But also, we need to create new fans. Kids these days haven't seen puppets. They've seen fuzzy puppets. They haven't seen puppets that look like this. This is quite different. It's quite scary. There's a lot of action, a lot of drama, a few deaths. So, a lot of that stuff, it's multi-generational, but it definitely brings in everything you know about The Dark Crystal."

"I love CGI, but we’re not using CGI in this one. [...] Puppets, man. Puppets!"

"Q: Silly question. What do you think will take to kill the Hulk?"

"I'd like to be an American Catherine Deneuve. She plays beautiful, sensitive, deep parts with a little bit of intelligence behind them."

"Catherine Deneuve seems to have been made for cinema, and cinema for her. She IS French cinema. She seems to be getting more adventurous every year."

"She's not an icon in life. She knows things, and she's very clever. I think she's very shy. She tries to protect herself a lot."

"I try not to think that I am acting, but that I am the person. And instead of giving the audience your fantasies completely, I think it is more interesting to give them a place where they can imagine things instead of knowing everything; but maybe that is very French."

"There is no such thing as a Hollywood career for a French actress today. You can come here and do films like Juliette Binoche, but you can't come here and have a career. It's because you don’t sign with studios anymore. I remember when I did Umbrellas of Cherbourg, I signed a contract with Fox. At the time, actresses would be proposed different scripts because they had to use you. Sure it had some inconvenience, but actors made films they might not ever make if they weren't under contract. Now, only individual producers choose and actors are left on their own."

"I think that women who have to deal with a big amount of people have to compartmentalize themselves. You have to have an attitude of strength in a way because you are supposed to direct and organize the life of people in that way, aloof. It doesn't mean much, it's just an attitude."

"It was a film about character but also about actresses too, and she is the most important French actress for 50 years. When she accepted, it was very easy to build a cast around her."

"I think it's very tiring to be Catherine Deneuve each day"

"There's a very big challenge in the United States when it comes to ageing, especially for actors and actresses. I'm not saying it's easy in Europe, but in Europe we accept more readily to make movies with women in leading roles who are 40, 45, 50 years old. That is still very rarely seen in the US."

"[On wearing clothes made by the Yves Saint Laurent brand] You are more aware of what you wear. You feel totally different. When you live in public, it gives you an attitude that helps you be confident with people you don’t know."

"It's the social networks that prevent people from dreaming any more about stars. Their private life is displayed constantly on social networks; and some even post private pictures of themselves. I find it a pity. Being a star entails glamour and secrecy; it's hard to keep any degree of mystery nowadays."

"I can be very critical on myself and on other people; when I work, I can be very demanding. But to direct... I admire directors so much, I find them incredible: they manage such a huge number of people of different characters, think of the money involved. And they have to make decisions all the time, they have to answer all the time. I think it's incredible. No, no, I wouldn't be able to do that. I imagine that you have to forget about what the project represents sometimes because otherwise you become a monster. It's incredible the amount of responsibility and power you have. I wouldn't want that."

"We just enhance the eyes, a quiver of the mouth, the eyes fluttering a little bit, glossing over. But it's still the glass eye of the puppet, it's still the skin of the puppet, we move it just slightly, and that made a huge difference. The limits I set were that it cannot be better than what you could do with an amazing animatronic puppet with lots of motors and stuff."

"In every scene at least I want to do something that has never been done with a puppet. I was coming up with some ideas and concepts, doodles for how the puppets could do these things. I want to see a puppet swim, I want to see a puppet crashing through water, I want to see it run, I want to see it jump."

"My challenge was working with puppets, but their challenge was working with Louis Leterrier. I was non-compromising, "this will not look like your grandfather's puppet show, and this will look like The Dark Crystal, that broke the mould then, so let's break it again and bring puppetry as far as it can get", and that's really what we did."

""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)"

"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 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)"

"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."

"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end … but not necessarily in that order."

"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."