“When I started I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. I started – I made a film. Then when I finished I said, Oh my god it’s so beautiful – I should be a filmmaker!”

I live in cinema. I feel I’ve lived here forever.

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.

I see all these students, and I admire them – they’re trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help.

I didn’t go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom.

I should say nothing! I’m through with it! I hate to repeat myself all the time.

It’s a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.

You are always in the world. Even in Vagabond. I am not on the road, I am not eating nothing.

I tried to find a language for the film – not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain.

People think you are an orphan when you are a child, and don’t believe that old people can feel that they are orphans.

I’m missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.

It’s interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves – not so much to learn about me.

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn’t need to have muscles.

I think the digital cameras have changed my view. Even though sometimes, including the installations that I show, I mix 35mm filming and video handmade.

When I did the first edit of Les plages, it was very dry and very square in a way. I was just saying the minimum. I said, Well, if this is the minimum, I don’t make it. So I tried to make it more refined.

Nostalgia doesn’t make sense, because it’s like bringing the memories back to be a special part of my day or to be part of my week. And I’m inside my memories the same way I’m inside my everyday life.

You have to invent life.

The story of Salome, the play itself and what it is, what it contains, and my journey as an actor, as a director, as a filmmaker, as a person struggling with whatever I’m struggling with.

I believe that it is this quality that draws people to come and see a film, and that it is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the filmmaker to make his film in the first place.

I don’t try to make a place in history at all! People put me in the history of cinema because my first film, La pointe-courte, was so ahead of some other filmmakers.

Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time.

There are certain artists and filmmakers who, I get the impression, are trying to show off how bad their characters can be, how immoral their characters can be.

I’m a filmmaker, I’m a storyteller, an entertainer, if you will, so what can I do to participate?

I’m pretty committed to being a filmmaker because it incorporates everything I love: music, art direction, story, and you know – everything.

I think, as a filmmaker, it’s important to be honest with yourself at all times in terms of what’s working and what’s not.