“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.”

I wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it’s been a struggle.

I had a world. I don’t think I had a career. I made films.

If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.

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.

I go back to many films that I really love.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

I never fought, I never learned kung fu or boxing, I never went into these sportif competitions. I wouldn’t cross the ocean.

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 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 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.

A person always doing his or her best becomes a natural leader, just by example.

I admire Madonna because she always did whatever she felt like doing. She went through some controversial periods when people rejected her, but she kept on reinventing herself.

I’ve done without doing things, like sleeping and eating, but I need to write.

I’m never content with what I do. I live in a sort of permanent dissatisfaction. I think that’s the secret to doing things well.

This personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human.

I have a sort of empty feeling; nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth the doing.

I’m eighteen years behind in my ironing. There’s no use doing it now, it doesn’t fit anybody I know.

The one thing that I always try and take with me, if there’s, like, a remake, or you’re doing something again, is that every generation has a new story to tell.