“. On television the first reactions are usually unfavorable.”

I can’t see any reason why a film shouldn’t be stylized and visually beautiful. I don’t think a beautiful set is pretentious.

For some reason the more time that elapses after the film opens, the more favorable the reviews become.

We should all die with a sharp, brusque heart attack. My father was lucky like that.

There cannot be any communication except through form. If there is no form, you cannot create emotion in the spectator.

When I was 12 I made some little films with my friends. I tried to make gangster films, like Fantomas, but I remember being very disappointed with them.

It was repugnant, but it was the only way to communicate.

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

When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me-I still watch silent films.

I saw part of The Singing Detective on TV in New York. I said, Something is going on here.

So I used formal techniques to make the film more perceptive emotionally.

My films seem to be better understood and better received by the monthly publications

For me an unfavorable initial reaction happens fairly often.

I don’t think that there is any such thing as an old film; you don’t say, ‘I read an old book by Flaubert,’ or ‘I saw an old play by Moliere.’

They weren’t frightening at all. I’m sure they’d be very funny now.

I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film.

I am never driven. Every film Ive made has been an assignment.

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‘feeling’ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.

I think if a girl is easy to talk to then that’s the first thing I look for.

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‘escape of energy,’ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

When I was old enough to change my name, I changed it to Mr. T so that the first word out of someone’s mouth was ‘Mister,’ a sign of respect.

When I went into the last lap I was regretting a bit that it was over. I was enjoying again the first sector for the last time.