In movies, it's so easy to have this 'boom,' to kill, and I think that's inhumane.

I was the little French boy who grew up hearing people talk of De Gaulle and the Resistance. France against the Nazis! Then when that boy grew up, he began to uncover things. We began to legitimately ask the question, 'What exactly did our parents do during the Occupation?' We discovered it was not the story they were telling us.

An archetypal gangster is always at a remove. We can't get into his mindset.

If you look at American studios, the big productions have nothing to do with reality.

Beauty is subjective: Bette Davis wasn't beautiful, but she was more than beautiful.

When you're a kid and your father is an engineer, he goes to the office. I saw my father get up and go to the office in the house and write. But I don't see any similarities.

The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.