Interviews
"In our documentaries, we focused on moments in history that we had known as kids or that preceded us with the workers’ movement, but essentially we always focused on individual trajectories, individual portraits. And maybe that’s the link with our fiction work."
"I’m an anxious person. What I like best is to smoke cigarettes and listen to music. A perfect day for me is a day with coffee, cigarettes, and music, to quote Jim Jarmusch."
"We process thoughts and feelings as images. They echo within and stay with us. Cinema has a capacity of capturing those moments."
"Using film is also a psychological issue. For the director, and the actors, it creates a different kind of concentration. You understand you have just one attempt to make this."
"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."