Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I go in front of the light - go towards it - it is because it brings me energy. That's all.
The projector will soon disappear. The camera, not really. OK, it depends... it depends on change.
When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
I am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period.
Once I had seen 'Journey to Italy,' I knew that, even if I were never to make movies, I could make them.
First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.
I'm Franco-Swiss. I've always been shuttling between these two worlds, never firmly planted in either one.
I don't have a visa for the U.S., and I don't want to apply for one. And I don't want to fly for that long.
I'm satisfied to have an ordinary success and an ordinary life and an ordinary income. Later, I don't know.
Cinema is capitalism in its purest form.... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema.
When you are out in the land, OK, you have the land but you are alone with it. And sometimes it is too much.
Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.
I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie.
When Yeats said the center cannot hold, he was talking for himself, but it was true for the rest of us as well.
Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.
There is no more discovery. Not since the beginning of this century. There are new gadgets. New important gadgets.
I'm very interested in tennis, but when I try to tell younger players about [Bill] Tilden, they're not interested.
Spielberg, like many others, wants to convince before he discusses. In that, there is something very totalitarian.
There are no more simple images... The world is too much for an image. You need several of them, a chain of images.
One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.
Hollywood was invented by hoodlums from central Europe. And today a Hollywood lawyer is not a hoodlum. He's a bureaucrat.
There are two kinds of homeland: one that is given is like a negative, and one that you have to conquer is like the positive.
One has to change one's life. Maybe this is easier for people who have nothing to do than for those who have something to do.
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.
If you have made three or four films, my feeling is, he is older than me because I am still making my first movie. That helps me.
I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory.
Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.
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.
Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.
The fact is that, unless you are very good, most first movies are too long, and you lose your rhythm and your audience over two or three hours.
What I like in pictures whether by an old director or a young director is when I have the feeling he or she is really using the capacity of film.
If I'm speaking it means that in one way or another when I say, "I'm cold" it belongs to me: I'm cold. But just by saying this it becomes general.
In Europe, the houses and the apartments are getting smaller. So there is no need to increase the screen because the apartment is becoming smaller.
Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)
Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary?
If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.
If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.
(Landscapes) are too close to painting. And TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission. And you can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.
Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.
We were for Mao, but when we saw the films he was making, they were bad. So we understood that there was necessarily something wrong with what he was saying.
I write and film history; I don't make it. One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.
Now at my age I understand how sad it must have been for some directors or actors at the time the talkies began. Because, really, a whole continent disappeared.
People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me
Self-portraits have been done in painting, but never in music or literature. It has no meaning, it makes no sense. And in movies I was wondering if it could. And how.
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 Rolling Stones are much more accomplished than Jefferson Airplane, who are more like tribal people. That is, they present something which exists: The music and the hippie.
Words and action in movies are the spirit or the mind. And these days the body is almost completely forgotten. In the beginning the body - nature - was more part of the action.
A film ingeniously directed does indeed give the impression of having been laid end to end, but a film ingeniously edited gives the impression of having suppressed all direction.