I'd been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that's part of being shy.

I waited for each film to become important for me. If I had no ideas for a film, I didn't do a film. So I made not that many films for fifty-four years of working.

I didn't see films when I was young. I was stupid and naïve. Maybe I wouldn't have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me. I started totally free and crazy and innocent. Now I've seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don't do commercials, I don't do films pre-prepared by other people, I don't do star system. So I do my own little thing.

I had flops, I had success.

People like my films. They understand me through my films; it's like a connection that has been established between all my work and myself and the audience and the viewer.

There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, "Le jeu et les moi." It's impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound. It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

The freedom he gave himself to work and change shape and change ideas and work all the time with joy, the joy of painting was in [Publo] Picasso, which I found beautiful.