“Opera was the cinema of its time, so to bring back that popular appeal, you just need to unleash its visceral immediacy and excitement. Most productions don’t manage that – but when an opera does do it, you never forget it.”

A life lived in fear is a life half lived.

I do find walking is fundamental to my creative process.

My wife is the fact-checker, I’m in the story telling business.

I feel a kinship with anyone who feels that their road, their life or who they really are is not good enough. I really relate to that.

It’s pretty hard to get mugged in Manhattan.

At a very young age I was allowed to go into the cinema and watch adult films.

If Paris is a city of lights, Sydney is the city of fireworks.

The ugly duckling is a misunderstood universal myth. It’s not about turning into a blonde Barbie doll or becoming what you dream of being; it’s about self-revelation, becoming who you are.

Why live life from dream to dream, and dread the day when dreaming ends.

Look, I had a passion for comic books growing up.

Having grown up far, far away in a small country town in Australia, I was only slightly aware of hip-hop.

When I was growing up you would see big American films that really mythologised their landscape, that really showed the vastness and the drama of their country.

The race is long but in the end it is only with YOURSELF.

There’s a whole system in Hollywood where the director never speaks to the studio, but I like to engage them in a discussion. I listen.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn’t make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

I wouldn’t take a directing job if I didn’t think it was enriching life.

I think this is the area where writers need to place ourselves: from a position of absolute modernity and contemporaneity, creating a culture of objects which cinema cannot.

I’m still fighting. I don’t know how much longer, but I’m still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film.

It’s a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It’s a long process to let it happen.

If there’s one thing that can save the novel, it is to make it independent of cinema, to narrate in a way that cinema can never narrate, using to its benefit those particular characteristics which belong to writing.

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.

The structure of my novels has nothing to do with the narrative mode of cinema. My novels would be very difficult to film without ruining them completely.

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

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high – you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.