“I call [ordinary people] real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure – stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little.”

It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

If you know nothing, it could be like an enemy in a way. I think that’s the way I felt when I was young.

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

I was free always. I could work without the money, to film this and that. But this is another point, because now I’m alone, and I can just use it when I want.

I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that’s it. I don’t know why we should transform them.

Gleaning is getting things that are abandoned. I did not abandon my early pictures, my photos, my early films. It’s just going through my body of work as something I can pick from.

I didn’t have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal – because I think cinema should come from cinema.

I try to do nothing. I drink rosemary when I have a lot of work to do. People take coffee, they take speed, whatever. I take rosemary.

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.

An old woman I loved very much when I was young – the wife of Jean Villard – she’s just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That’s all she does.

There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, “Le jeu et les moi.” It’s impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound.

I don’t do films pre-prepared by other people, I don’t do star system. So I do my own little thing.

I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

I hated myself totally white. So now I cheat. It’s my white hair, and I put color there.

When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done – people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway – in France we have Nathalie Sarraute – and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater.

Good cinema is good cinema. It makes you feel like you need to work.

A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true.

I’m proud to have played characters who’ve inspired people to live out loud, and I’m lucky to have reached an audience that’s been incredibly enthusiastic and supportive.

I know I’m incredibly unpredictable, and that’s the only thing I’m sure of.

When I started, I felt that there was this incredible amount of doubt of my ability as a producer.

Needle in a haystack, a small town on a roadmap, searching for you through the abstract- how incredibly hard to find.

Writing can be an incredible mindfulness practice.

A show is like having a climax. It’s like having an incredible, natural climax. And then suddenly it’s all finished, and you don’t know what to do next.

I have been supremely lucky in my life in that I have known great love, and of course I am the temporary custodian of some incredible and beautiful things.