Of course there's conscious manipulation! Everything about a movie is manipulation ... If you like it, it's an interpretation. If you don't like it, it's a lie - but everything about these movies is a distortion."

One's relationship to time is complicated, and sometimes a day will drag on forever and sometimes it'll be over in a flash. When you look back, "I'm old," after 40 or 60 years, I can't believe I'm as old as I am.

My job as a film editor is to construct a dramatic narrative because otherwise it's just a chaotic arrangement of sequences.

I'm very careful of not being critical of other people's movies, which work in different styles. I think some of my movies can be interpreted as critical of their subjects.

A lot of the issues of rhythm in film are found in the editing because it's very rare that any sequence is the sequence that is shot.

I am bad at cultural generalizations but I would venture to say that by a wide margin there is less hypocrisy about sex in France than in America.

Even if I know I'm going to go to a church, I don't know what the minister's going to say.