Laying tracks gives you freedom without being too obvious.

I don’t think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can’t kiss a movie.

First I went to the Sorbonne to do my licence en lettres, but I also started to study law.

Some colors are very difficult to render, and you must compensate to get the color you want on the screen.

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.

I brought the film like a flower to the world.

There was one thing which I thought was tremendous fun, namely finding as many angles as possible within the confines of a single room.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

I like making black and white films in natural surroundings, but I much prefer shooting a color film inside a studio where the colors are easier to control.

There’s one thing which I hate about color films… people who use up a lot of their despairing producer’s money by working in the laboratory to bring out the dominant hues, or to make color...

I like to have the screen full of color, twenty colors on the screen at once, fifty colors. There are no dominants despite what people have said.

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.

I love mirrors. They let one pass through the surface of things.

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.

I remember an article, I can’t recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone...

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

I wanted to make a film about stupid people that was very vulgar and deeply stupid. From that moment on I can hardly be reproached for making a film that is about stupid people.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

My father wanted me to be a pharmacist like himself. He had been a doctor, but he no longer believed in medicine; so he became a pharmacist, but he believed in that hardly more.

I’m not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can’t be separated.

A woman confronting men is a proper subject, it is inexhaustible.

I’m not wild about hand-held shots.

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.

A woman is subject matter enough.

It’s often wrong to write for specific actors because one ends up using what is least interesting about them, their mannerisms and habits. I prefer not to write for specific people.

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.

As far as I was concerned, either I was a homosexual or I wasn’t, so making films would change nothing.