“I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo – and I kept it all my life!”

I did not think that woman would be restrained. I never saw that, especially not in filmmaking, where you don’t have to be strong.

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.

I think I got people confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film.

People like my films. They understand me through my films; it’s like a connection that has been established between all my work and myself and the audience and the viewer.

I don’t watch my own films. There is little time; I’d rather see another film.

Society is so slow. A feminist is a bore.

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.

Observe the world around you everything you do, and especially everything you hate to do.

Your belief system saturates the space around you.

Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.

And I’m not so in love with making people mad that I want to live my life around it.

The world’s pretty trippy. I just like to travel around and see what’s out there.

[on sexual politics] The Golden Rule works for men as written, but for women it should go the other way around. We need to do unto ourselves as we do unto others.

I never understood actors who could just wait around.

I only sound intelligent when there’s a good script writer around.