The fact is that, unless you are very good, most first movies are too long, and you lose your rhythm and your audience over two or three hours.

To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.

I learned from Rossellini that you are rich even if you have a little money.

Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie.

Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.

All our thinking constitutes the new world, but all our thoughts are older and older.

I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not.