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

But in a way we all have a Mona. We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed.

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.

I’m trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.

The film critics don’t know my artwork and the art world doesn’t know my films.

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

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.

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.

What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.

The future of cinema and communications is all about collaboration and the decentralized control of storytelling.

Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.

Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.