Interviews
"I’ve always been interested in reality and I’ve always been terrified of escape. I don’t like escape in my personal life or in my art, and I prefer to try to understand how I should behave in this world based on what’s really around me."
" A sound can give you the dimensions of a room. It can give you smell, it can give you tension. In some ways sound can travel itself into other areas of our senses, other areas of our psyche that unfortunately cannot be just viewed."
"You can watch a Herzog film or Barry Lyndon and they’re epic in scale but they’re also hilarious and you can tune the humor out or in. The greats have always walked that line."
Carax: "Americans are hard to hate, because they're very diverse. You can't just say that they're disgusting because they live long and their eyes are shaped like the female sex. It's very different."
"A lot of who you are is going to find its way onto the screen regardless of your own efforts. Your work will always be marked by who you are and where you came from. Hell, even something as ridiculous as the weather can exert a huge influence over who you are as a person."
"Something he said to me a couple of times was, 'I really think I missed the boat on Hitchcock.'”
"That’s always been a great adventure for me, looking at the work of a director. But there’s also the individual film, and the individual moment."
"One of the things that I think cinema does that no other art does is that you can really have things that are noble and things that are not noble, and they’re of equal value."
"That’s the difficult thing about directing and then editing: you’re locked away in a room with a bunch of bad material. Only filmmakers understand that most of what you record is shit. And then you spend two years constantly looking at stuff that’s failed miserably."
"Whatever is happening now in Asia, in India, what is going on in Russia…it’s those parts of the world that are catching up with modern history, creating this huge turmoil where anything can happen, which defines the world we live in."
"That is really the message of Strike—we can’t truly influence history with all these ideologies and political structures, but it is very important that every single human behaves in a decent way because the society as a whole becomes more decent."
"We always repeat things. When we fall in love, it’s always the same. And when we think about something, we always keep thinking. Do you remember the first time you met your boyfriend? It was the same. But then maybe you got different angles."
"The idea really came from being a musician and loving music. When I watch films I find myself responding to the score much more than the dialogue. I always imagine that the director wrote the music."
"Point of Order was made out of absolute junk, in junky kinescope. But it was the first time that anybody had taken a complete hearing and made something more real out of it than the reality, because the reality of it wasn’t very real."