Bruno Dumont quotes:

The battle between two men over a girl is the same as the fight for two men over a piece of land. It is all about desire. There is no difference between a love triangle and the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Cinema is all about going back from shadow to light and back and forth: cinema is a place of transgression.

Matching character and actor is what a good director does.

When you make movies, you have to be preoccupied with the social problems, otherwise there is no point in making a movie. To have a story, you need a social problem. Not necessarily a problem, but something to get the idea for a story, otherwise there's no story.

At the root of the Noble Savage myth is this basic truth: the savage is good, but he's also violent. This is why Rousseau propounded the need for contracts between the savage and society. The savage also shows that in order to understand the need for civilization and culture, mankind needs to see barbarism. One could not exist without the other.

Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.

I'm not Catholic. I don't believe in God. But at the same time, I'm obsessed by the sacred, by spirituality. The question of redemption has been present well before Christianity, but as French people are a bit stupid, they see all that in religious terms.

Women exist in my imagination. So they are necessarily a type of abstraction. Many women criticise me for this vision, but I explain to them it's to be expected, because I am a man.

I think that the cinema is a physical thing. What I'm looking for is creating a physical shock with the audience. I don't care of the meaning. I don't care of the idea. I don't want to say something. I want to make a 'shock physique.'

I don't watch my own past films: when I watch them, I find they don't work very well, because I have changed. If I continue to make films, in fact, it is because I always want to repair my films. My inner rhythm has changed; I have changed. I have changed my way to film.

Cinema builds memories; great films continue to exist in the spectator's mind. We are naturally capable of and prone to nostalgia. A spectator will reconstruct a film he or she has seen, years later, and may even change their original opinion. One critic, for example, once gave the finger to one of my films; later he wrote me to apologize.

No movie can claim to be a work of philosophy. They fulfill a totally different need in people.

There is no god. I am an atheist. It is up to us to become God. We need to be elevated, to become saints. God alienates people from themselves.

I like the idea of challenging Hollywood on its own turf. It's important to do that.

My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched. It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.

My life is existing. Cinema is certainly not my life

An actor is an instrument. One needs to control them.

Sound creates an intimate effect: the sensation to feel the place. It makes the viewer enter. You have the liberty to hear what you want.

I think there's not a lot of real filmmakers. There are only a few people who make real cinema. I can count them on my fingers.

The people follow what the media say. So if you said that Bruno Dumont is fantastic, it follows that more people would go to see my films. I have no wish to remain on the sidelines. I have no wish to make films that are only seen by bohemians in London and Paris.

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

The landscape is a reflection of the inner life. Since I can't shoot the inner life, all I can shoot is the exterior but I know that when I'm filming outside, I'm filming inside. I can only really touch the inside through the mise-en-scene. So through the mise-en-scene of the outside we can explore the inside

Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me. I use direct sound, mono not stereo. Just direct sound, so for every shot there are only two sources. Sound creates an intimate effect: the sensation to feel the place. It makes the viewer enter. You have the liberty to hear what you want.

Good and evil are polar concepts - one can't exist without the other.

To retain his dignity, an artist must live in opposition. He must be critical of his country. If not, then he is worthless.

The more elaborate your narrative, the more the spectator shuts up and listens obediently. And if the filmmaker keeps quiet, the spectator will himself project his own assumptions and sentiments onto the screen.

There's a longstanding myth about the United States that is still very prevalent in Europe [despite recent developments]. Historically the "America" of this myth is an incredible human adventure and an experiment in political democracy. But at the same time, or so we're told, it's the land of extremes where the worst can happen.

You can't go further than being naked.

Sex becomes violent when you eliminate all the sentiments... voila, it gets crude.

The United States is such a potent political, cultural, and economic model in the evocation of the contemporary world, that to come here, select some elements from the prototype and rearrange them, that's really interesting artistically.