What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.
Do you not hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence?
I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.
Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.
With actors, normally I don’t like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this.
Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.
I have been in lots of very intense life situations. I have been shot at, and I have been hungry, and I have been in solitude, and I have also briefly been behind bars. So in a way, I know the heart of men.
Facts do not convey truth. That’s a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.
I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.
I think the worst that can happen in filmmaking is if you’re working with a storyboard. That kills all intuition, all fantasy, all creativity.
Women have a very good sense for seeing instantly what constitutes a good man. Not physically. The physical strength is only a small side of it.
Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.
Martin Luther was asked, what would you do if tomorrow the world would come to an end, and he said, ‘I would plant an apple tree today.’ This is a real good answer. I would start shooting a movie.
For me, the distinction between documentaries and feature films is not so clear – my “documentaries” were largely scripted, rehearsed, and repeated, and have a lot of fantasy and concoction in them.
The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.
I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema.
English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it.
Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.