We are in the twentieth or the twenty-first century, but all the thinking, if you speak to one of those people keen on technology - you see that all their thinking is two centuries old. In cinema, you can show this.

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.

The average income in France is $1,000 a month, and you can't live decently on that.

I write and film history; I don't make it.

I've always said that to make movies, to make images and sound, is possible by one way or another. And it has not to be ruled by the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Pharaohs from Hollywood or wherever. I have tried very hard to make even a small budget picture here. It always fails. Over a dozen times. And now I know why. It was only because I wanted to be in control of the money. To spend it the way I wanted.

The way we have done pictures has to be disappeared.

Self-portraits have been done in painting, but never in music or literature. It has no meaning, it makes no sense. And in movies I was wondering if it could. And how.