Of course, we avoid death. To know something is inevitable is one thing. To accept, to truly feel it... that's different.

Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable.

In general, in all my films, I choose to create a certain mistrust, rather than claiming that what I'm showing onscreen is an accurate reproduction of reality. I want people to question what they are seeing onscreen. In the same way as I used the narrator, I also used black and white, because it creates a distance toward what's being seen. I see the film as an artifact rather than a reliable reconstruction of a reality that we cannot know.

The difficulty, then, is 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.

If I tell the audience what they should think, then I am robbing them of their own imagination and their own capacity of deciding what's important to them.

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.

I always seek to mobilize, to call on the imagination of the spectator. It's well-known that the images that are created by one's imagination are far stronger than any that I can show. In fact, it's an error, a widespread error in mainstream cinema, to always want to show things and to depict things.