The experience of life teaches us that being like someone in love is more real, because everything is uncertain.

In my opinion the man looks at the relationship in a more bitter fashion and the woman still holds great hopes.

I had intended to make another film, called Pocket Money, which was to be about children at a school. I was very much intrigued by the story [of Close Up] - it came into my dreams and I was very much influenced by it. So I called my producer and asked that we put aside Pocket Money and start something else, and he agreed.

The one-word cinema wasn't possible for me anymore. I'd hit a wall, a dead end. Therefore I thought I'd turn back.

Whether you consider me a master filmmaker or not, I do it with my intuition and my vision, my experience as a storyteller.

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.

When I met Akira Kurosawa in Japan, one question he asked me was, "How did you actually make the children act the way they do? I do have children in my films but I find that I reduce and reduce their presence until I have to get rid of them because there's no way that I can direct them." My own thought is that one is very grand, like an emperor on a horse, and it's very hard for a child to relate to that. In order to be able to cooperate with a child, you have to come down to below their level in order to communicate with them.