I think life is so difficult to catch, it's so furtive, that a copy, a film, can in no way catch it and represent it.

Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time.

It's very true that non-actors feel more comfortable in front of a digital camera, without the lights and the large crowd around them, and we arrive at much more intimate moments with them.

When the film [Certified Copy] was in the Cannes Festival, I realized that the fact of having it shot in a different culture, in a different language, in a different setting, that wasn't mine and that I didn't belong to, gave me a totally different relationship to the film. When I was sitting in the audience during the official screening in Cannes, I didn't feel that it was my film.

It's not so much a question of whether we've shot it through 35mm or digital video; what is important is whether the audience accepts it as real.

All the different nations in the world, despite their differences of appearance and religion and language and way of life, still have one thing in common, and that is what's inside of all of us. If we X-rayed the insides of different human beings, we wouldn't be able to tell from those X-rays what the person's language or background or race is.

I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame.