"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."

"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."

"All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl."

"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."

"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."

"The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea."

"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."

"She left me because of my many faults; I left her because I couldn’t talk movies with her."

"Film begins with D. W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami."

"Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents."

"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."

"To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema."

"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!"

"[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."

"I would never see a good movie for the first time on television."

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