When critics love your film, you love critics. When they hate your film, you hate critics. It's the same everywhere, but maybe especially in France, where we have pretty good critics, except for three or four newspapers that are really dogmatic.

In France, I am so free. I have more freedom than most American directors could dare to even imagine.

It's always been pretty easy for me to exercise my imagination. The other part of the brain, the one that does mathematics, is a nightmare for me. It doesn't work at all.

There is a new philosophy for weapons: it's more expensive to hurt people than to kill people. It's terrible. When you have a band of guys on the battlefield, if someone is dead, he's dead. If someone is injured then they have to take care of him, so six people are busy.

I think of a film as being like a toy train.

It's always more interesting and more difficult to make something positive than negative. To be negative is very easy.

All day my mind drifts off into fantasies and little stupid jokes.