“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.”
“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”
“The funnier it is in the beginning of a story, the more dramatic it can become. Because when an audience is laughing, that's opening their souls somehow, and when you have an audience with an open soul, it's much better to hit them with a knife.”
“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.”
“Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it's the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.”