On the set I make jokes I can't get too involved, or it turns into sentimental soup. I try to keep it light.

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.

Treat your heart like a turnstile. Open it to only those who got valid tickets.

Elegance comes from being as beautiful inside as outside.

That amenity which the French have developed into a great art . . . conversation.

Britain is characterised not just by its independence but, above all, by its openness. We have always been a country that reaches out. That turns its face to the world.

Bury me on my face," said Diogenes; and when he was asked why, he replied, "Because in a little while everything will be turned upside down.

I am not what I think. I am thinking what I think.

Women and men have to fight together to change society - and both will benefit.

When we truly realize that we are all alone is when we need others the most.

I’m an atheist, and I believe religion is totally against human rights and women’s rights.

Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson.