Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.

I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images.

Film is simply the most complex way you can express yourself

I'm not really a happy person. It's a question of temperament. I have a tendency toward melancholy. You can feel quite happily melancholic.

An artist is someone who should raise questions rather than give answers. I have no message.

If I tell the audience what they should think, then I am robbing them of their own imagination and their own capacity of deciding what's important to them.

I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears with my work. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.

I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world.

Drama lives on conflict. If you're trying to deal with social issues seriously, there's no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society.

At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him.

The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.

One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.

I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We're switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we're in the business of transferring emotions to other people.

A flower doesn't count the number of bees that come nor does it pump up its smell just when you walk by. Its nature, as is ours, is to expand itself no matter if anyone ever loves us back.

Be wary of people who use quotes... I don't know who said that.

A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.

Calling a show a 'guilty pleasure' is like saying 'I'm embarrassed to say I watch it but I can't stop.' That's not a compliment.

In a military operation, the command and control elements are a legitimate target.

What you think about expands. If your thoughts are centered on what's missing, then what's missing, by definition, will have to expand.