I can't give any absolute definition of what love is, or even whether it ought to exist.

I read somewhere that happiness is like the bluebird of Maeterlinck: Try to catch it and it loses its color. It's like trying to hold water in your hands. The more you squeeze it, the more the water runs away.

After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules.

I want an actor to try to give me what I ask in the best and most exact way possible. He mustn't try to find out more, because then there's the danger that he'll become his own director.

In any case, the idea of giving "all" of reality is overly simple and absurd.

The script is a starting point, not a fixed highway. I must look through the camera to see if what I've written on the page is right or not. In the script, you describe imagined scenes, but it's all suspended in mid-air. Often, an actor viewed against a wall or a landscape, or seen through a window, is much more eloquent than the lines you've given him. So then you take out the lines. This happens often to me and I end up saying what I want with a movement or a gesture.

I'm more or less skeptical about marriage, because of family ties, relations between children and parents - it's all so depressing.