Images
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.
Jean-Luc Godard
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.
To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn't stand up for them.
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
We once believed we were auteurs, but we weren't. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It's sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.
I make film to make time pass.
More or less, I am always saying, 'Give me more. Let's do what has not been done.'
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.
Three-quarters of directors waste four hours on a shot that requires five minutes of actual directing. I prefer to have five minutes' work for the crew - and keep the three hours to myself for thought.
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
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.
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.
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 cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone... means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them.
A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.
Through most of my career, I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.
I want to be together with everyone else but stay lonely.
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.
I prefer to work when there are people against whom I have to struggle.
Every edit is a lie.
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
At the cinema, we do not think - we are thought.
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.
Spielberg, like many others, wants to convince before he discusses. In that, there is something very totalitarian.
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.
The idea is to make the script out of a political analysis and then to convey that - sometimes in poetry, sometimes science, sometimes all it takes is a film. The film itself is less and less spectacular because I think very strongly now the more spectacular you are, the more you are absorbed by the things you are trying to destroy.
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.
The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.
I know nothing of life except through the cinema.
People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.
Once I had seen 'Journey to Italy', I knew that, even if I were never to make movies, I could make them.
The history of cinema appears to be easy to do, since it is, after all, made up of images; cinema appears to be the only medium where all one has to do is re-project these images so that one can see what has happened.
Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.
Why did they go to Hollywood? Because they could get access to the American financial sector. The Jews were neither authorized to be bankers or doctors nor lawyers or professors. That's why they concentrated on something new: cinema.
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
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.
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