“In order to be able to cooperate with a child, you have to come down to below their level in order to communicate with them. Actors are also like children.”

Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time.

As long as I take the responsibility of the choice, I have to make the choice that is as right as possible.

There were years when Hitchcock was like a master to me, but now I think he’s so artificial. I can watch films and say how technically beautiful they are, but I’m not impressed by any technicality.

I did not have a script [of Close Up]. I made notes in the evenings and we filmed during the day over 40 days.I didn’t sleep a wink for those 40 nights.

Silence doesn’t seem heavy or difficult.

I would be too selfish if I said everyone should see my movies more than once. To say that would mean I’m just marketing my work!

It seems that film-makers are being divided between those working in digital and those who are not. I think it’s not something predetermined – it all depends on what project we have in mind, and on that basis we choose the medium.

Those same people, when they leave the theater, when they look behind the curtains they are curious about their neighbors, they can guess if their neighbors are siblings or a couple, how old they are, what their occupation is.

I do believe that a film like Ten could never have been made with a 35mm camera. The first part of the film lasts 17 minutes, and by the end of that part, the kid has totally forgotten the camera.

I have a picture from the end of the shoot, and in it I have lost all my hair.

I don’t have very complete scripts for my films. I have a general outline and a character in my mind, and I make no notes until I find the character who’s in my mind in reality.

I wasn’t searching for a common denominator – I started wondering about the challenge of working in other cultures. What I reached was the sudden acknowledgment of the universal aspect of filmmaking.

Close-Up is a very particular film in my oeuvre. It’s a film that was made in a very particular way; mainly because I didn’t really have the time to think about how to go about making the film.

Good cinema is what we can believe and bad cinema is what we can’t believe. What you see and believe in is very much what I’m interested in.

My car’s my best friend. My office. My home. My location. I have a very intimate sense when I am in a car with someone next to me. We’re in the most comfortable seats because we’re not facing each other, but sitting side by side.

It’s very true that non-actors feel more comfortable in front of a digital camera, without the lights and the large crowd around them, and we arrive at much more intimate moments with them.

I was probably tall as a child, but I just stopped growing.

This is the age in which language and movement develop. The child must be safeguarded in order that these activities may develop freely.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

Suddenly, the child becomes very sensitive to the rudeness and humiliations which he had previously suffered with patient indifference.

At three years of age, the child has already laid the foundations of the human personality and needs the special help of education in the school.

When you have solved the problem of controlling the attention of the child, you have solved the entire problem of its education.

When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.

If the whole of mankind is to be united into one brotherhood, all obstacles must be removed so that men, all over the surface of the globe, should be as children playing in a garden.