“I’m myself – knowing I’m doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers.”

I’ve seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don’t do commercials,

The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It’s unbelievable.

Some Bresson, some Godard of the early times, the Cassavetes of those years I love. And the early Wim Wenders. But my own films I don’t watch, unless I need them.

The mirror is the tool of the one who wants to do a self-portrait. And if you want to make a photo you need a mirror.

I was a photographer first.I worked alone. I did it my way as much as I could. I have been sort of courageous about doing things, because I didn’t think I should do less than my brothers.

I had beautiful jewelery around me, and when I lost I would take the jewelery and say, Service – being very generous, because it was very expensive jewelery. I would say, Tip.

I think it’s ridiculous to take such risk. But look, people love to do that. But I was not afraid of doing things I wished to do.

To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States – black people didn’t have the right to vote.

I don’t believe in inspiration that arrives like a bolt from the blue … It seems to me that the more motivated I am by what I film, the more objectively I film.

I’m interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more.

She almost doesn’t recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We’re the ones who are suffering. She’s not.

I’m still fighting. I don’t know how much longer, but I’m still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film.

I think people should be different. I love people who don’t go by the rule that you have to be careful because you’re old, you have to do this and that, you have to eat this and that.

But in a way we all have a Mona. We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed.

It’s a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It’s a long process to let it happen.

I dont see why people are so snooty about Channel Five. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap-dancing, and other related and vital subjects

I’m doing quite a few things now. In one day, I will go to Kassel, Germany, for a documentary project I’ve been preparing for half a year.

I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn’t want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject.

Even Vagabond – it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

People just don’t get as engaged in that kind of documentary – they don’t fall in love, they don’t cry, they don’t forget who they are, they don’t ride with you.

There’s a real difference between a documentary that was all about facts and history and information.

In my mind, there isn’t as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one.

I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.