Film Directors From France

"Science does not aim to cover exhaustively the whole of reality, but to construct systems and concepts which will perhaps — and it is a big perhaps — allow man to act on the world."

"I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don't think I've really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war."

"The Dalai Lama was little known, because he had never traveled abroad and was not yet a Nobel Prize winner, but he opened all the doors for me and I was able to film all the greats Tibetan masters, rinpothes and toulkus who had fled with him."

"At that time, the Dalai Lama was much more accessible, I had breakfast with him and spend long moments alone with him."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"If we want to give back to future generations what we have taken for granted, we have to understand the planet as a natural resource bank account. In other words, we need to start investing in depleted capital and live off the interest instead. There are plenty of individuals from both countries who are conscious of these things and trying to do better. But, we need to do much better as a global society. All countries need to communicate the importance of this life support system and protect this web of life. We must be able to live with the planet and not on it."

"This is an inheritance for the future, and what better way to get people interested and understanding that than getting them involved. The key elements are education, empowerment, and restoration. Education: getting people to connect with the ocean, to understand why it's important, why they should care, whether they're on the oceanside or not. Empowerment: saying, you can make a difference, and come with us, let's go do it together. And of course the restoration aspect is the payoff."

"Nothing is impossible. We need to dream, we need to be creative, and we all need to have an adventure in order to create miracles in the darkest of times. And whether it's about climate change or eradicating poverty or giving back to future generations what we've taken for granted, it's about adventure. And who knows, maybe there will be underwater cities, and maybe some of you will become the future aquanauts."

"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 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"

"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."

"I'm not saying that you have to love it all. [...] But, yes, you should love it all."

"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."

"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 waited so long to tell this story partly because when I started to make comics I didn’t want to be the guy of Arab origin who makes comics about Arab people…I didn’t want to be the official Arab comics artist. So I made a lot of comics in France which weren’t related to this part of me. I made a movie. But even during all that other work, I was thinking I have this good story, how could I tell it?"

"I tried not to generalize. But a lot of guys are like my father. He came from a poor family — the gap between where he started and where he ended up as a doctor was too big, and he was thinking he had a destiny! He was a little bit crazy. And he was so proud of this. He also hated Israel. It was a huge humiliation for him and his friends — the defeats by Israel. It was like a personal defeat. So he hated the United States, of course; he hated Europe because they had good relations with Israel. It was, like, biblical. As if Europe and the United States prefer the Jew to the Arab. And he wanted to say, “But I am as intelligent as them.” It was very strange."

"(What’s the last great book you read?) ...I tore through two volumes of “The Arab of the Future,” by Riad Sattouf — it’s the most enjoyable graphic novel I’ve read in a while."

"So the reader thinks: “My God, this man is saying horrible things in front of a child!”…It’s more sincere ... I wanted to try to describe the dark side and the positive side – if there was a positive side – all together ... I wanted to express the paradox that was in my father between modernity and tradition. It is a very common and human paradox. How can you be modern and progressive and still respect ancestral tradition? It generates conflict in the mind, I think."

"I don’t want to read modern comics, comics that are made today. I take care not to read too many contemporary comics, because I’m afraid it will influence me. Or it will complex me in a way. I see someone doing something great and I will say, “Oh, my god, I am shit — what am I doing?” So I prefer not to read them. Sometimes, when it appears to be incredible, I will read it — but I’m very afraid of reading modern comics. I read only old things and things I liked when I was young…"

"My family history is made of migration; it’s something that’s part of my own complexity."

"As a mixed [-race] girl, there’s always a visible and invisible side of you; there’s a place you inhabit and place you desert,” she says. “How does the place that you don’t live in influence you?"

"When I started writing the script, I realized that I hadn’t really seen any film with a black couple that was worthy of Romeo and Juliet…And through Ada and Souleiman I wanted to relate a similar kind of tragic love, in the age of rampant capitalism."

"I started to watch the ocean. I was not looking at it like I used to; it became like a grave."

"When they talk about “The men ruined this, the men did that,” it is a person, and their sex comes after what they’ve done. I believe that we say too much “We the women” and “We the men,” but should say “We the human beings.” There are really two types of human being -- the ones who care about environment, who want a more just society; and the other ones who care about greed and war. So it’s not a question of East and West, and American and Iranian, and women and men."

"If the majority of people were right, we'd be living in paradise. But we are not living in paradise, we are living in hell. What does it mean? That means the majority of people are wrong. So I never believed what people told me."

"This is past, and it really comes from a very dark moment of my life. Dying is...When people say there is no alternative, there is always an alternative - to die, for example. It's a choice. You always have this choice."

"The words are not the same and the feeling is not the same. You know, they say in France that translation is like a woman. She is either beautiful or faithful. So it’s better when she’s beautiful because when she’s too faithful it might be very ugly. This is French people. This translation, though, is very well made. This is my American editor, who knows me very well who has made the translation. But in any translation you lose a little bit."

"Well depressive, I don't know. If you have a little sensibility or a heart you have all the reason to be depressed once in a while. But the depression is like a motor for creation. I need a little bit of depression, a bit of acid in my stomach, to be able to create. When I'm happy I just want to dance.""

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"[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."

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

"From the amorous point of view Véronique belonged, as we all do, to a sacrificed generation. She had certainly been capable of love; she wished to still be capable it, I'll say that for her; but it was no longer possible. A scarce, artificial and belated phenomenon, love can only blossom under certain mental conditions, rarely conjoined, and totally opposed to the freedom of morals which characterizes the modern era. Véronique had known too many discothèques, too many lovers; such a way of life impoverishes a human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible damage. Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two. In reality the successive sexual experiences accumulated during adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag. And so one leads, obviously, a slag's life; in ageing one becomes less seductive, and on that account bitter. One is jealous of the younger, and so one hates them. Condemned to remain unvowable, this hatred festers and becomes increasingly fervent; then it dies down and fades away, just as everything fades away. All that remains is resentment and disgust, sickness and the anticipation of death."

"But isn't this an illusion? We know that men, given the chance to choose for themselves, will all make exactly the same same choice. That's why most societies, especially Muslim societies, have matchmakers. It's a very important profession, reserved for women of great experience and wisdom. As women, obviously, they are allowed to see girls naked, and so they conduct a sort of evaluation, and correlate the girls' physical appearance with the social status of their future husbands. In your case, I can promise, you'd have nothing to complain about...""

"To begin with Tisserand appeared to be interested in a twenty-something brunette, a secretary most like. I was highly inclined to approve of his choice. On the one hand the girl was no great beauty, and would doubtless be a pushover; her breasts, though good-sized, were already a bit slack, and her buttocks appeared flaccid; in a few years, one felt, all this would sag completely. On the other hand her somewhat audacious get-up unambiguously underlined her intention to find a sexual partner: her thin taffeta dress twirled with every movement, revealing a suspender belt and minuscule g-string in black lace which left her buttocks completely naked. To be sure, her serious, even slightly obstinate face seemed to indicate a prudent character; here was a girl who must surely carry condoms in her bag. [...]"

"On my return I sensed that something new was in the offing. A girl was sitting at the table next to mine, alone. She was much younger than Véronique, she might have been seventeen; that aside, she horribly resembled her. Her extremely simple, rather ample dress of beige did not really show off the contours of her body; they scarcely had need of it. The wide hips, the firm and smooth buttocks; the suppleness of the waist which leads the hands up to a pair of round, ample and soft breasts; the hands which rest confidently on the waist, espousing the noble rotundity of the hips. I knew it all; all I had to do was close my eyes to remember. Up to the face, full and candid, expressing the calm seduction of the natural woman, confident of her beauty. [...]"

"I was starting to feel like vomiting, and I had a hard-on; things were at a pretty pass. I said `Excuse me a moment,' and crossed the discothéque in the direction of the toilets. Once inside I put two fingers down my throat, but the amount of vomit proved feeble and disappointing. Then I masturbated with altogether greater success: I began thinking of Véronique a bit,of course, but then I concentrated on vaginas in general and that did the trick. Ejaculation came after a couple of minutes; it brought me a feeling of confidence and certainty. [...]"

"I was very shocked that it was called a theory. It's not a theory, it's a fact."

"You get used to terrorist attacks. France will hold on. The French will hold on, without even needing a “sursaut national,” a national pushback reflex. They’ll hold on because there’s no other way, and because you get used to everything. No human force, not even fear, is stronger than habit."

"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)"

"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)"

"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)"