The only thing I find interesting is self-interest.
— Claire Denis
I have no relationship to the French bourgeoisie. I don't like connecting with them.
Making pizza is a great job. All that kneading the dough - everything to do with cooking is wonderful, sensual.
I'm not a very brave person.
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.
I think working as an assistant was a part of knowing people who like cinema, and to learn from a movie, you have to watch it.
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 can be unkind to someone in the street or in the subway - I'm a bad-tempered person - but I'm unable to be unkind to a character. They exist because of me, and I have responsibility for them.
Sometimes I feel like John Wayne.
I am always asked, 'You grew up in Africa?' Every time I introduce a film, or I'm interviewed, 'You grew up in Africa?'
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
I've heard it said many times, 'Let's work on the look of the film,' but that doesn't work with me.
I hate the idea of growing accustomed to someone and being faithful.
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.
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.
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.
It's not that I don't like words. There's sometimes no need for words.
In a way, I feel obliged to respect Jean Rouch because I am told he is very important.
I don't want to be mysterious.
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.
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.
'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.
I don't remember being afraid of anything in making films.
Inside the family, you can go from hate to passivity to extreme love within the same hour.
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.
Because TV is mostly close up, it has to be fast. And because it has to be fast, you don't have time to explain completely, by a sequence shot, what's happening between people. So instead of experiencing what's happening, say, when a couple is dancing, dialogue is used to explain.
I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature - my brain is.
I'm tiny. I'm small.
I long to make films. I'm dying to be inside the next film. I always hope there will be another film.
I don't think I see the way bodies move in any special way. People say I do, but everybody moves. I don't see why all of a sudden I'm a specialist in the way bodies move.
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've experienced love and ambition and desire in my life, but never in the same way as in a family.
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.
Sometimes bleak is good. Sometimes bleak is necessary. Some part of life is always bleak.
A film takes a lot of time, and yet not enough to share with the people you're making the movie with, I think.
'White Material' is about courage and craziness.
The history of colonisation cannot disappear.
I am the eldest child; it's lonely at the top.
There seem to be more women producers than men.
I reproach so many things about my family, but on the other hand, I kept asking them to be my family.
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 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.
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.
I didn't foresee my career. Things happen.
You don't grow up naive in Africa.
