Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.
I don’t think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can’t kiss a movie.
The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and ‘get’ everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don’t understand each atom of the potato!
There is no such thing as intellectual property.
You don’t make a movie, the movie makes you.
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
There is no point in having sharp images when you’ve fuzzy ideas.
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.
Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.
First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.
Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.
Truth is in all things, even partly, in error.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.
Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.
Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.
People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.
To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body – both go together, they can’t be separated.