“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.”

I don’t believe in inspiration that arrives like a bolt from the blue … It seems to me that the more motivated I am by what I film, the more objectively I film.

I’m interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more.

She almost doesn’t recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We’re the ones who are suffering. She’s not.

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.

I think people should be different. I love people who don’t go by the rule that you have to be careful because you’re old, you have to do this and that, you have to eat this and that.

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.