“I've always loved the idea of fairy tales, but somehow I never managed to completely connect with them. What interests me is taking those classic images and themes and trying to contemporize them a bit. I believe folk tales and fairy tales have some sort of psychological foundation that makes that possible.”
“I consider my films first and foremost to be dramas about individuals in personal struggles and I consider myself to be a dramatist before I am a political filmmaker.”
“Cinema never saved anyone's life, it is not a medicine that will save anyone's life. It is only an aspirin.
There are a few directors that I really loved who made like five, six great movies, but are still shooting and they're not good anymore.”
“There's something to be said for failing. It's not the failure you feel, it's the failure that people project when something disappoints. You're back to ground zero, where there's no expectations, and that's where I like to be.”
“I feel most akin as an artist, in my life and my career, to Agatha Christie. I get where she was coming from, making 80 stories about a point of view. I want at the end of the day to have 50 or 60 stories that came out of my head. Some will hit the mainstream and some won’t, but they’ll all be about human beings, and the analysis of human beings. So she’s my hero.”
“I wouldn't say I'm a very controlling person. For instance, when I talk to the actors, I don't tell them exactly what I want because I want them to surprise me. I even encourage them to change some of the verses of the script if they need to.”
“When you grow up like that, and suddenly you decide you intend to make movies, everybody says, 'It's impossible.' And I'm here and I'm living my dream.”
“Being able to shoot on videos and commercials — just being on the set, with only a certain amount of time and shots and sequences to do in that amount of time, learning how to work with the crew the physical production and the limitations — is all good training.”
“I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.”
“We’re supposed to capture what’s in the air and give a form to it. The artist is like an antenna, always searching for new ideas and ways to express them.”
“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”
“I wanted to make a fake Paris, a Paris of dreams, like in my head when I was twenty and I arrived in Paris for the first time. I wanted to avoid the bad things: traffic jams, dog shit on the street, the rain.”
“There are successes and failures in what we’re doing, but that’s the road we’re walking down – stealing from culture all over the place to write a code so that very quickly the audience can swing from the lowest possible comedy moment to the highest possible tragedy with a bit of music in the middle.”