Film Directors From France

"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."

"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!"

"It's easy to direct while acting — there’s one less person to argue with."

"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."

"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."

"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'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."

"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.""

"It's weird. I always had the premonition that Sharon belonged to me just for a little while."

"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."

"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."

"Sylvia Earle's generation — they were explorers...They’re like, what is even down there? How do we understand this? And then: Oh [bleep], this is in trouble. And they all became conservationists, right? We saw that same professional transformation with Jacques Cousteau."

"Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and turn headlong down an immutable course."

"We have to prepare for what life could become in 40 years. We need to outline what is possible and what is impossible with the non-renewable resources of the Earth. What role will technological improvement play? Taking all this into account, what kind of life can we produce in the best way for 10 billion people? That's a problem that needs to be solved."

"In the last few decades, a terribly pernicious rumor has been circulated by the press. It claims, exhibiting a level of stupidity heretofore considered impossible, that a human being could crawl through the arteries of a blue whale. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. I do not know why this deleterious rumor has been systematically repeated, but its very existence is an ugly cancer upon the face of science."

"I said that the oceans were sick but they're not going to die. There is no death possible in the oceans — there will always be life — but they're getting sicker every year."

"The glory of nature provides evidence that God exists"

"I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists."

"Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy."

"What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on."

"Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction — up, down, sideways — by merely flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel."

"From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free."

"If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed — if we are not willing — we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect."

"Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians."

"We must plant the sea and herd its animals … using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about — farming replacing hunting."

"The sea is the universal sewer."

"Sylvia Earle, though a great scientist, is also the heir to Jacques Cousteau, inducting the landbound among us into the mysteries of the sea, helping us to feel both astonished and at ease."

"When it counted, Gary was ultimately accurate, as when he left a suicide note in 1980, explaining that he decided to end his life because he had written all he wished to write and not because his estranged and tormented ex-wife, film star Jean Seberg, had committed suicide a year earlier. Yet such basic home truths in Gary’s life and work can be obscured by his prose style and grandiose, self-mythifying persona. The Dance of Genghis Cohn itself demonstrates Gary’s paradoxical approach of using, as Bellos observes, “vulgarity and coruscating wit to defeat the greatest obscenity of 20th-century history, the slaughter of the Jews by Nazi Germany.” The novel’s protagonist (a blend of Mongol and Jewish, as Gary himself claimed to be), murdered by the Nazis in 1943, becomes a dybbuk in the mind of his executioner. The victim/protagonist forces his murderer to sing songs redolent of Yiddishkeit, like “My Yiddishe Mama.” Such burlesque ironies, painted with broad brushstrokes in a popular novel published one year before the release of Mel Brooks’s film The Producers, demonstrated the comic potential of ridiculing Hitler, but offended some readers in France, notably a critic from the weekly news magazine L’Express, who termed The Dance of Genghis Cohn an “affront to the memory of those who died at Auschwitz.” Forty-five years on, readers and critics are relishing the same pitilessly absurdist authorial voice, describing savage and coarse events of modern history in the savage and coarse terms that so troubled Gary’s readers when his books first appeared decades ago."

"I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me."

"A writer’s subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there."

"There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz."

"Gari in Russian means "burn!"… I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off."

"During the war he was an airman and slaughtered civilians from on high."

"The gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar… I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you."

"Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him."