“You know, an hour and fifty-four minutes is too much for audiences. They get nervous.”

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.

This is all you need in life: a computer, a camera, and a cat.

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer.

I’m not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman – not unless she is looking for new images.

Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don’t want time to come back.

I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don’t even want to meet them or see them.

Having a story is what people connect with, but the story alone doesn’t allow you to achieve greatness and results. It’s the day-to-day consistency of providing value to your audience.

The whole idea is just to continue to make movies that I enjoy playing and that audiences are going to enjoy me in just to put out quality on a lot of different levels.

You never really know what’s going to happen. You never know what the audience is going to be like or how they’re going to behave.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

The philosophy has always been pretty clean and straightforward, which is that if I see something that I like and I can see it’s value to the audience and it’s value to me then I’m going to take my shot at it regardless at the genre.

I try to bring the audience’s own drama – tears and laughter they know about – to them.

Although it is a fantasy film, it’s as real as it can be. You have to imagine that an audience will buy their ticket to a cinema and get on a first-class flight and journey to Middle Earth.

I don’t believe in elitism. I don’t think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.