Used properly, cinema is the coolest thing in the world.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

When someone is punched in the face, you find out what they are made of.

I think ‘Scarface’ is a great film, but if you have a character like Tony Montana, you don’t identify with him at all. I think it’s very interesting instead to identify yourself with a character...

I don’t like spontaneity; there you go. I’m wary of it.

He was more interested in having a discussion on Proust than on Welles,

The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.

It’s truly gratifying to see my films reach beyond a familiar public, to get a chance to move new audiences. It’s nuts. It’s extraordinary.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped,

Cinema for me only has meaning when it has a relationship with what I see outside on the street.

What interests me about genre is that the public connects immediately with it, it has certain rules, certain codes the audience recognizes. I can use that to create something very big.

It wouldn’t be unthinkable that he would chase her out with a baseball bat,

If you look at American studios, the big productions have nothing to do with reality.

I don’t feel comfortable with violence, and I’m not sure that I film violent scenes properly, and it’s something I’m reticent to do, and yet violence is sort of in all of my films.

I come from a tradition of screenwriting — with a co-writer — where everything is challenged, where you have to defend every idea, … I am a robber of ideas, but for there to be...

Do we root for Michael Corleone in the ‘Godfather’ films? I think so, even if he is a monster.

I was the little French boy who grew up hearing people talk of De Gaulle and the Resistance. France against the Nazis! Then when that boy grew up, he began to uncover things. We began...

I really believe the form of the film must be in the scenario; cinema is not just added value to the scripting. I believe in it as a totality.

If I ask my actors to bare themselves, to reveal themselves as almost naked, I have to bare myself, expose myself as well. That’s what creates excitement.

For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment....

When things aren’t working out, we have a tendency to say, ‘Go do other things,’ but you shouldn’t do other things. You need to stay at your desk and continue to try to write. You...

Beauty is subjective: Bette Davis wasn’t beautiful, but she was more than beautiful.

When you’re a kid and your father is an engineer, he goes to the office. I saw my father get up and go to the office in the house and write. But I don’t see...

The cinema that interests me departs from realism.

In movies, it’s so easy to have this ‘boom,’ to kill, and I think that’s inhumane.

Cool? Am I cool? I don’t know, but I hope my characters are cool, in the sense of iconic. That’s my job, at its very essence.

The most heroic thing you can do is tell someone that you love them.