filmmaking

Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

Yet in recent years I have witnessed a new phenomenon among filmgoers, especially those considered intelligent and perceptive. I have a name for this phenomenon: the Instant White-out. People are closeted in cozy darkness; they turn off their mobile phones and willingly give themselves, for ninety minutes or two hours, to a new film that got a fourstar rating in the newspaper. They follow the pictures and the plot, understand what is spoken either in the original tongue or via dubbing or subtitles, enjoy lush locations and clever scenes, and even if they find the story superficial or preposterous, it is not enough to pry them from their seats and make them leave the theatre in the middle of the show.But something strange happens. After a short while, a week or two, sometimes even less, the film is whitened out, erased, as if it never happened. They can__ remember its name, or who the actors were, or the plot. The movie fades into the darkness of the movie house, and what remains is at most a ticket stub left accidentally in one__ pocket.

You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.

A lot of film people are like that_ especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them. It's not about art or ideas. It's about working at something and making it come out right.

If you can film an idea in your mind, follow that film idea shot for shot, scene for scene, that idea is worth making.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.

The crew was mostly men. That's how it was and that's pretty much how it still is. It's a man's world & show business is a man's meal with women generously sprinkled through it like over-qualified spice.

I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl.

The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.

A Film has the potential to kindle such a spark of inspiration in an individual that it can alter the course of human progress.

Entertain, but also, give the viewer something to think about.

Healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction.

Healthy entertainment is a beautiful blend of stimuli that can connect with the viewer at a sentimental level, then sow the seeds of a certain idea or feed the mind with inspiration and courage. In short, healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction. This leads to not only an entertained viewer, but also an inspired soul. And that should be the purpose of film-making, and indeed the entire entertainment industry, rather than feeding the general population with garbage.

Success or Failure, there should always be a Drive to Keep on Creating.

When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy... you can bet he's worried either about his story or his ability to tell it.

All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories.