“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.”

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.

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.

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.

It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.

As beautiful as cinema is, it’s a massive part of the problem of why we look at ourselves in the way we do.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

We really are living in the era that all this sci-fi literature and cinema was centered around.

Performing a one-man Macbeth feels like the greatest challenge.

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

Movie queens diffuse into Cinema haze, while libertines read pornozines in street cafes.

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.