“I tried to find images, allegorical images, that I could use to express things that I didn’t want to say or didn’t want to show or I was not able to find how to show.”

I tried to find a language for the film – not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain.

People think you are an orphan when you are a child, and don’t believe that old people can feel that they are orphans.

I’m missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.

It’s interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves – not so much to learn about me.

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn’t need to have muscles.

I think the digital cameras have changed my view. Even though sometimes, including the installations that I show, I mix 35mm filming and video handmade.

When I did the first edit of Les plages, it was very dry and very square in a way. I was just saying the minimum. I said, Well, if this is the minimum, I don’t make it. So I tried to make it more refined.

Nostalgia doesn’t make sense, because it’s like bringing the memories back to be a special part of my day or to be part of my week. And I’m inside my memories the same way I’m inside my everyday life.

You have to invent life.

When I started I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. I started – I made a film. Then when I finished I said, Oh my god it’s so beautiful – I should be a filmmaker!

It’s nice to think that we have in ourselves the energy. It’s somewhere, but it’s sleeping sometimes. I try to wake it up when I need it.

I didn’t see films when I was young. I was stupid and naïve. Maybe I wouldn’t have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me.

In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.

Sometimes I say, If I had seen some masterpieces, maybe I wouldn’t have dared start. I started very – not innocent, but naïve in a way.

I’ve always been like this – trying to find adventure where it’s still in its first élan – the first spring.

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer. Women have to make jokes about themselves, laugh about themselves, because they have nothing to lose.

Putting a label [homosexual] on myself was a big step forward…once I said, ‘Yes, that’s me, that’s what I am,’ I was able to work with it.

If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.

Once you start rewriting, you’re not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.

You never know what’s going to happen. That’s why I like acting. It’s precious to me to be able to live more than one life.

No doubt that the U.S. is a super-power capable of conquering a relatively small country, but is it able to control it?

They appear to have become so attached to their outrage that they are even more outraged that they won’t be able to be outraged anymore.

By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware.