If I ask my actors to bare themselves, to reveal themselves as almost naked, I have to bare myself, expose myself as well. That's what creates excitement.

Cinema for me only has meaning when it has a relationship with what I see outside on the street.

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

I don't feel comfortable with violence, and I'm not sure that I film violent scenes properly, and it's something I'm reticent to do, and yet violence is sort of in all of my films.

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

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

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