I wanted to describe the world at the same time, through image, express what I felt. It was the time of the great documentary filmmakers: Richard Leacock, Joris Ivens. Today, television has put an end...

Interior liberty is universal.

Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she’d been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She’d gone once, twice,...

Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator’s memory.

Of course I’d like to get beyond the concrete. But it’s really difficult. Very difficult.

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.

Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.

In ten phrases, the ten commandments express the essential of life. And these three words-liberty, equality, and fraternity-do just as much. Millions of people have died for those ideals.

Regardless of the subject of my films … I am looking for a way of evoking in audiences feelings similar to my own: the physically painful impotence and sorrow that assail me when I see...

The television industry doesn’t like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that’s black; this is good, that’s bad.

[on Rouge] This is a film about communication that disappears. We have better and better tools and less and less communication with each other. We only exchange information.

There are mysteries, secret zones in each individual.

Of course, you could, no doubt, call my going to film school the biggest mistake I ever made.

Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity? Is it not some manner of speaking?

We all steal, but if we’re smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.

For me optimism is two lovers walking into the sunset arm in arm. Or maybe into the sunrise-whatever appeals to you.

You have to want to make a film for other reasons – to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody’s fate – but you can’t want to make a film simply for the...

In real life, there are names that surprise us because they don’t seem to suit the person at all.

Ale tak naprawdę robię filmy, bo nie umiem nic innego. To był zły wybór, którego kiedyś dokonałem. Wtedy prawdopodobnie nie mógł być inny. Dzisiaj wiem, że był zły. To jest zawód, który jest bardzo trudny....

I have no problem being with people of different nationalities.

Why did they devise censorship? To show a world which doesn’t exist, an ideal world, or what they envisaged as the ideal world. And we wanted to depict the world as it was.

We’re always looking at this love through the eyes of the person who is suffering because of this love.

But I reckon that this realm of higher needs, of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us.

The films should be influenced by the individual commandments to the same degree that the commandments influence our daily lives

To tell you the truth, in my work, love is always in opposition to the elements. It creates dilemmas. It brings in suffering. We can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it. You’ll...

That’s the greatest sin a director can commit; to make a film simply because he wants to make a film.