A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone... means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them.
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
At the cinema, we do not think - we are thought.
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.
Every edit is a lie.
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.
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.
I know nothing of life except through the cinema.
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.
People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.
Three-quarters of directors waste four hours on a shot that requires five minutes of actual directing. I prefer to have five minutes' work for the crew - and keep the three hours to myself for thought.
When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn't stand up for them.
We once believed we were auteurs, but we weren't. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It's sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.
The history of cinema appears to be easy to do, since it is, after all, made up of images; cinema appears to be the only medium where all one has to do is re-project these images so that one can see what has happened.
