French Cinema Quotes

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It's like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high - you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

To me, Sheitan movie is the answer to all the problems we have in France concerning immigration. That is a fake problem; people can actually work together and do something very interesting out of it.

For me, the French new wave is Truffaut and Rohmer. Godard I sometimes have trouble with because he's very much of a director's director. I feel Truffaut is such a humanist, and I always go in that direction.

Sure, I watched a lot of Hollywood movies. Maybe I've seen more Hollywood movies than French movies.

In France, it's always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies.

I guess, being French, I love Hollywood.

There's a big film industry in Egypt, and quite a big one in Syria, and there's a big Muslim community in Paris.

I liked the idea of working with Jean Reno and Mathieu Kassovitz; there was something logical for me. I thought it was a good thing to do. Actually, The Crimson Rivers movie was a big success, and it was one of the biggest successes I ever had in France.

Steven Soderbergh really likes Irréversible, that's about all I can tell you. About the making, well, it was a very particular situation, because those people all know each other, and they're all big stars. I felt like the little French guy, really. And I was very flattered to be called on that, of course, but I felt like if I didn't find something to be a little original, different, particular in the movie, I would just disappear.

Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.

Staying home and watching French movies is what I normally like to do.

Of course the French are making very credible movies and it is still one of the greatest nations in terms of world cinema but the real problem is the decay in film criticism.

France has not only built a bureaucratic barrier against American culture, it has constructed a notorious intellectual case against it as well. The French spend hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing film production, extend interest-free loans to designated filmmakers, and have placed quotas not only on imports but on television time.

French cinema has always been very interesting, and it's still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it's great to still have a cinema that doesn't try to emulate, for example, American cinema.

She was obsessed with French and Swedish cinema. I also remember our mother showing us 'Gone With the Wind' very early on. She absolutely loved Vivien Leigh, so it must have been a formative experience for me, thinking, 'Oh, maybe one day I'll be like Vivien Leigh.'

I love French style from the Thirties and Forties. French movie stars like Jean Gabin and Yves Montand had so much natural, effortless style.

My life is OK. I live in France. It's a very cool country to make films.

In France, I have lots of opportunities. Maybe now I'll be offered films in America. It's the encounter, with the director and the story that counts.

I loved Paris, Je T'aime. It's like my top favorite things I've ever done and I think it was a beautiful. I think it was a perfect seven minute movie, or whatever it was.

I always loved Japanese movies. And they had an enormous impact in France - the Nouvelle Vague took so much from them. It taught us how the camera was placed in the centre of the action.

Many French directors, having now realised there was no more real criticism, that the standards of the past have gone, are very offended about the quality of film criticism.

French cinema audiences usually don't express anything. Certainly not satisfaction.

I think that in France, we really admire American films, we admire their drive, we admire the modernity and ellipsism in the film and the writing and the style of acting, and we look at them perhaps in a way to see what we can steal from them, too, to make our own films more modern.

If I had only one film in the world to save, it would be 'Grand Illusion.'

French cinema allows women to look... a certain way and be talented at the same time.