It's more enjoyable to shoot in a studio on a single location with two actors... if they are good.

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.

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

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

If you wish to compare, compare yourself with God's commandment.

It's not about being good. It's about being brave.

That which the Fascists hate above all else, is intelligence.

When you first start working, you take whatever job is offered, because you have to build your resume. But you don't think about what you're building.

Do I open it? Do I open it? Of course I freaking open it!

One Buddha is not enough; we need to have many Buddhas.

One rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it/Never lend any money to anybody unless they don't need it.

Your life is constantly nourished by your thoughts. Whatever the direction your life is moving, your thoughts have led you there.

It raises several serious questions. For example, how can there possibly be more than one person as awesome as me?