CLAUDE CHABROL

You have to accept the fact that sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue.

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 films where there isn't any color.

You make a film to distract people, to interest them, perhaps to make them think, perhaps to help them be a little less naive, a little better than they were.

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.

Laying tracks gives you freedom without being too obvious.

I am a Communist, certainly, but that doesn't mean I have to make films about the wheat harvest.

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

I'm not wild about hand-held shots.

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.

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

Stupidity is infinitely more fascinating that intelligence. Intelligence has its limits while stupidity has none.

Films with a message just make me laugh.

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.

A woman is subject matter enough.

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.

There is no new wave, only the sea.

To observe a profoundly stupid individual can be very enriching, and that's why we should never feel contempt for them.

We live in an era where pizzas show up faster than the police.

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 with money could ever say such a thing.

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

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

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

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

I brought the film like a flower to the world.

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.