Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.

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 cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

The world isn't a sad place, it's just big.

What I like in pictures whether by an old director or a young director is when I have the feeling he or she is really using the capacity of film.

In Europe, the houses and the apartments are getting smaller. So there is no need to increase the screen because the apartment is becoming smaller.

Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.