An artist is someone who should raise questions rather than give answers. I have no message.

I think that what's important as a director is to give your actors the feeling that they're protected, the feeling of confidence, the feeling that if they make mistakes, then as a director, you'll know how to help them. If you're able to convey that, then the actors will give you wonderful performances. As well as the author, you have to write scenes that give the actors the opportunity to show what they're capable of.

Usually, when making a film, the surprises are negative surprises. You don't get what you wanted or what you hoped for. The only nice surprises are those that are offered to you by actors when they offer you these gifts, when they are better and give you more than what you had originally conceived. That doesn't happen every day on set, but if it happens a couple of times in the course of making a film, you can consider yourself very lucky.

Drama lives on conflict. If you're trying to deal with social issues seriously, there's no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society.

Never say no. It always depends on what's possible. I don't care so much where it is; it's what I want to do that matters.

I'm not really a happy person. It's a question of temperament. I have a tendency toward melancholy. You can feel quite happily melancholic.

When you create a church, an institution, and you create a dogma. When you create an ideology, that's the danger. Communism, too, is a beautiful idea, but millions of people died when communism became an ideology.