If you have $300,000 to shoot a cigarette on a table, it's an enormous amount of money. Maybe that's why my movies are the way they are. But it's the only way I can make a living.

People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.

Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body - both go together, they can't be separated.

(Landscapes) are too close to painting. And TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission. And you can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

When the film stock disappears, the matter - because movies are matter - (disappears). The laws of this have been established by Newton, Einstein, and others: there is a correspondence between light and matter, and light is matter. And energy.

There is no such thing as intellectual property.