Louis Malle Quotes

Every movie has its uniqueness. You just do your best and go with it.

The whole point of film for me is that it's such a joy. It's such a wonder. The possibilities are literally endless in terms of what you can creatively do.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.

Always when you are doing films, the themes swallow you in one way or another.

It's not just about acting. I love film, I'm a director now, I love writing, I love producing, I love having a company that makes films and to be prolific and have a place to put all the ideas that are constantly bubbling up inside of me and that don't let me sleep at night.

Sure, you always put some of your own experience into a film.

If I watch 'Gone With the Wind,' I always find it interesting. I think, 'What's going to happen next? What's that character going to do?' But you know, you never really need to watch the films you made again. They stay inside you, always with you.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.

My films start with images, a few images and a few feelings, and I try to edit them together to see the correspondence between these images and these feelings.

Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.

We all learn every day, and that's the magic about film making.

Making an authentic film about anything is difficult.

There's something that comes into you that's so exciting when you're directing.

Our brains have this habit of quilting dreams from the fabrics of our lives. As a filmmaker, I get to do it for a living.

In films, we tend to come up with something new all the time. Challenges and experiments are new at every stage.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

My art feels like it's real disobedient. I can fill notebooks with observations and maybe they find their way into the work unconsciously, which is great. I've never been able to directly plug, like to take a little snip that I've picked up on the street and transfer it into a story. I don't know what's wrong, but it never works that way.

I draw on my memories but blended with a lot of fantasy.

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.

Music is like color or acting or whatever. It's really something I think about from the beginning. Not that I always know exactly what I'm going to use, but I don't see it as something like, "Let's find some songs now!" after we have a finished film.

It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.