“I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.”

I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That’s what I try to do all the time.

I’d been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that’s part of being shy.

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.

Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time.

To share a lot of ideas – not ideas – emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator.

Even Vagabond – it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

If you know nothing, it could be like an enemy in a way. I think that’s the way I felt when I was young.

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

I was free always. I could work without the money, to film this and that. But this is another point, because now I’m alone, and I can just use it when I want.

I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that’s it. I don’t know why we should transform them.

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.

You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.’

Things happen differently when you’re actually here, so you can’t put out a general guideline that’s gonna show up in text and be interpreted. There are no rules. Just be yourself.

In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.

People do it differently in different cultures because they have different interpretations, that’s how it should be.

What I don’t do – and this is the only thing I do differently in writing for kids – is that I don’t revel in the gory details.

A viewer as opposed to a filmmaker might see a film differently. But I’m extremely comfortable with my style.

So then why get upset if somebody like me Tries to look at the world just a bit differently?

The chess game; how I set you up early, and how I’ll do it differently later.