I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
I make film to make time pass.
I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory.
To be immortal and then die.
American pictures usually have no subject, only a story. A pretty woman is not a subject. Julia Roberts doing this and that is not a subject.
Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.
We once believed we were auteurs but we weren’t. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It’s sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.
People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me.
This is not a just image, this is just an image.
Movies are a world of Fragments.
Americans have no past, so they buy the pasts of others.
If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.
Poetry is a game of loser-take-all.
Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.
Suddenly, I don’t know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can’t say it. – Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie.
To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.
I would never see a good movie for the first time on television.
If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.
My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.