- Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud are my contemporaries.
- Sometimes I force myself. In the case of Bed & Board (1970) I laid down certain laws for myself. Henri Langlois, who loved Stolen Kisses (1968), said to me, "Now you have to get Jean-Pierre Léaud and Claude Jade married".
- Is the cinema more important than life?
- I have always preferred the reflect of the life to life itself
- Film lovers are sick people.
- Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.
- Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.
- Originally I didn't like [John Ford]--because of his material. For example, the comic secondary characters, the brutality, the male-female relationships typified by the man's slapping the woman on the backside. But eventually I came to understand that he had achieved an absolute uniformity of technical expertise. And his technique is the more admirable for being unobtrusive: His camera is invisible; his staging is perfect; he maintains a smoothness of surface in which no one scene is allowed to become more important than any other. Such mastery is possible only after one has made an enormous number of films. Questions of quality aside, John Ford is the Georges Simenon of directors.
- One looks at films differently when one is a director or a critic. For example, though I have always loved Citizen Kane (1941), I loved it in different ways at different stages of my career. When I saw it as a critic, I particularly admired the way the story is told: the fact that one is rarely permitted to see the person who interviews all the characters, the fact that chronology is not respected, things like that. As a director I cared more about technique: all the scenes are shot in a single take and do not use reverse cutting; in most scenes you hear the soundtrack before you see the corresponding images--that reflects Orson Welles' radio training, etc. Behaving like the ordinary spectator, one uses a film as if it were a drug; he is dazed by the motion and doesn't try to analyze. A critic, on the other hand, is forced to write summaries of films in 15 lines. That forces one to apprehend the structure of a film and to rationalize his liking for it.
- I make films that I would like to have seen when I was a young man.
- When I first saw Citizen Kane (1941), I was certain that never in my life had I loved a person the way I loved that film.
- Cinema is an improvement on life.
- [on Jean-Pierre Léaud] The most interesting actor of his generation. There are actors who are interesting even if they merely stand in front of a door; Léaud is one of them.
- [in 1964, on Edvin Laine's The Unknown Soldier (1955)] It has to be one of the best anti-war movies.
- [in "le Monde", Paris, 1962] The thing which gives me the courage to keep going is that in the cinema industry one does not feel isolated. Solitude is one of the greatest problems facing other artists such as abstract painters and musicians.
- [on Michelangelo Antonioni] Antonioni is the only important director I have nothing good to say about. He bores me; he's so solemn and humorless.
- The talent of [Jean-Luc Godard] goes toward a destructive object. Like [Pablo Picasso,, to whom he's compared very often, he destroys what he does; the act of creation is destructive. I like to work in tradition, in the constructive tradition.
- [In a 1973 interview] [Éric Rohmer] is the best French director now. He became famous very late compared to the rest of us, but for 15 years he's been behind us all the time. He's influenced us from behind for a long time.
- Like [Federico Fellini], I think that the "noble" film is the trap of traps, the sneakiest swindle in the industry. For a real filmmaker, nothing could be more boring to make than a The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)--scenes set inside office alternating with discussions between old fogies and some action scenes usually filmed by another crew. Rubbish, traps for fools, Oscar machines.
- [reviewing Scarface (1932) in 1954] This isn't literature. It may be dance or poetry. It is certainly cinema.
- Well, to put it bluntly, isn't there a certain incompatibility between the terms "cinema" and "Britain"?
- In Lubitsch Swiss cheese, each hole winks.
- There is only one kind of bad spectator: one who walks in after the film has started.
- We have heard 100 times that cinema is "an escape." We should remember this. For a good escape can be prepared only after many observations, long thinking, and in complete secrecy. It is not executed until one is sure that this is it; and then it is made in the dark of night, and in complete silence. So let's remember this when we prepare, shoot, or show our movies.
- [1973 interview, asked what are his favourite films] Well, Psycho (1960) and Rear Window (1954) are two. They are very perfect films. Rear Window is a film about film-making, as Hitchcock himself explained in the book I did with him. A man is watching life just as he would watch a film. Citizen Kane (1941) , also, is a film which is very well done. I also liked Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1971) very much. It was very odd but very beautiful. But if I was a big American producer, I would give money to Leonard Kastle to make two or three films because I think The Honeymoon Killers (1970) was one of the best American films in many years. The film is very human and anti-cliché; it is very real and at the same time very strong. And I think the actors in the film are excellent!
- [on The 400 Blows (1959)] The final freeze was an accident. I told Léaud to look into the camera. He did, but quickly turned his eyes away. Since I wanted that brief look he gave me the moment before he turned, I had no choice but to hold on it: hence the freeze.
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