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

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

Something that I tell myself every morning when I wake up is like: "Think it over, take the time to think it over." I don't like spontaneity, there you go. I'm wary of it.

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.

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

I think that cinema has always progressed through exchanges.

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.