Claire Denis quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • A career for me is something like building a bridge. You know, where to put the lifts. You have a plan. I have a blueprint for each film, but not for my life.

  • You can spend your whole life in France without ever thinking about the Legion.

  • Growing up outside your own country makes you feel that you don't belong when you return, so you feel free to make friends with whomever you like.

  • I have no relationship to the French bourgeoisie. I don't like connecting with them.

  • My mother's father was from Brazil - a painter, and not a famous one - and was always broke. But he was a free spirit, a great grandfather.

  • I've experienced love and ambition and desire in my life, but never in the same way as in a family.

  • I suppose I am interested in the variety of human life - how people live. I am most interested in individuals and how they respond to challenges or to difficulties or just to each other. I am curious about people.

  • I listen to a lot of different kinds of music.

  • Inside the family, you can go from hate to passivity to extreme love within the same hour.

  • I have very strong relationships with my actors when I'm shooting. When you love an actor's work, you always feel you have to go further, and you make several films together. One film just gives you time to get acquainted.

  • Chocolat' was a sort of statement of my own childhood, recognizing I experienced something from the end of the colonial era and the beginning of independence as I was a child that really made me aware of things I never forgot - a sort of childhood that made me different when I was a student in France.

  • Making pizza is a great job. All that kneading the dough - everything to do with cooking is wonderful, sensual.

  • We don't all look alike - some people think they're tough, some people think they're fragile - but in the end, we share a lot.

  • Filmmaking creates a sort of - trust, maybe. It has led me to a group of people I feel good with. We have something in common because of film, when otherwise we might have nothing.

  • I hate family pressures and family responsibilities. I'm more comfortable as a stranger. I always imagined I could just live in a hotel. I'm afraid of family.

  • What I like is the idea of a group, even if it's just two people - the idea of solitude within a group.

  • I really started watching films when I was 14. As I became a teenager, there was nothing that really interested me apart from music, books and films.

  • What I don't like so much is to give explanations about people's behaviour... I'm not interested in making conclusions. I would never think about myself or anyone else, 'Well, this happened, this happened, this happened, so this must be the result.' It doesn't work like that with me.

  • My grandfather died when I was 12, but I remember the sorrow of my mother. Even now, she's an old lady, but when she speaks about her father, she looks young. A love like that is undefeated, you know?

  • For some reason, I have always been interested in the stories of people who are exiled and who are deprived of rights. My main motive to make a film is to keep the society in mind and the hospitality adhered.

  • I was never very interested in my own experience, I think, in fact, if my films have a common link, maybe it's being a foreigner - it's common for people who are born abroad - they don't know so well where they belong.

  • When I was a child I had a nightmare, and in the morning, I asked my mother and father, 'If I kill someone, would you still love me?' My parents were very preoccupied with this, but I think I'm not the only one to ask for that - not love, but absolute fidelity.

  • I don't remember being afraid of anything in making films.

  • Marguerite Duras was a very good friend of mine and an intellectual hero. She was also a sort of mother figure. Of course she was an influence.

  • I hate the idea of growing accustomed to someone and being faithful.

  • The camera is not your eye, and it's not the eye of the audience. I don't think it's my eye, either. It belongs to the film.

  • I can't imagine a society with absolutely no solidarity. For me, it's a nightmare. And I don't want to live in a place like that.

  • The only thing I find interesting is self-interest.

  • I don't know - music in film, for me, is not another part of a soundtrack; it is something that also helps to approach a character, to foresee the type of image - you see what I mean - it's like a part of the process.

  • I long to make films. I'm dying to be inside the next film. I always hope there will be another film.

  • Africa is no more this poor continent. It's on the march.

  • I hate the victimization of women, always.

  • I'm not a tacky person, I think.

  • I reproach so many things about my family, but on the other hand, I kept asking them to be my family.

  • When I was doing 'Beau Travail,' I listened a lot to Benjamin Britten.

  • I am not at all interested in theories about cinema. I am only interested in images and people and sound. I am really a very simple person.

  • In Kurosawa's films, the tragedy is that this strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end.

  • Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.

  • When you have countries that have a lot of minerals and diamonds and oil and are in business with companies from all over the world - but these companies don't share, really, their profits - this is called post-post-colonial.

  • I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.

  • The cinema should be human and be part of people's lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me.

  • A father who sees his daughter leave in the arms of another man does not feel the same as a mother. It is heartrending for her, too. But it is not the same.

  • I think you cannot make films without choosing everything.

  • Filmmaking is to me very similar to being in a café somewhere in Paris and looking at the people walking by.

  • I always scout locations first. The apartments, the railway tracks, the café, the canal - I figure out the geography of the film.

  • Freedom is not having a big budget.

  • Start with scout locations first.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share