For me, those little cinemas in Paris where I saw many art films for the first time meant that cinema became a kind of pilgrimage site.
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.
When I discovered European filmmakers, it affected me so deeply. It redefined what cinema could be. I mean, 'Blow-Up' ends with a dead body and mimes playing tennis. What?
I went from silent films to watching French new wave cinema. I became entrapped by it all. That's when I knew I wanted to do film. The moment you start looking at film from a critique point of view - there's a difference between watching a film as an audience and with a critical point of view.
I grew up cinematically in the '70s. I was watching a lot of Godard, Bresson, Dreyer, and all sorts of old films and the Czech New Wave.
I'm a New Wave baby, so I got very stimulated by foreign film.
Louis Malle is maybe one of my favorite directors, but I love Tarantino.
My two style icons are Edie Sedgwick and Brigitte Bardot.
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.
One of my favourite films is called 'Lacombe Lucien,' directed by Louis Malle. The lead character in that film, like the lead characters in many '70s and '80s films, has a moral ambiguity to him.
It is universally agreed that Jean Renoir was one of the greatest of all directors, and he was also one of the warmest and most entertaining.
I can't summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati's 'Play Time.' You just have to see it.
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.
I love the Sixties and all those iconic women, Bridget Bardot and things like that, so I tend to lean towards those sorts of things.
I love beautiful black-and-white movies - anything Bette Davis, especially 'Now', 'Voyager', 'Casablanca', 'Mildred Pierce'; anything by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or Godard; and 'Paper Moon' by Peter Bogdanovich.
Truffaut loved Hitchcock.
It was a good experience working with Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda.
Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.
I was not raised with films. And when Alain Resnais did the editing on my first film, he said, 'You should go to the Cinematheque.' I didn't even know we had one in Paris.
I really liked the Jean-Luc Godard movie, 'Film Socialisme.'
Before seeing Truffaut 's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity a poetic comedy that's really funny.
Cocteau is someone who has made such a profound impression on me that there's no doubt he's influenced every one of my films.
'Pierrot le Fou' is something I keep coming back to. It's so surreal but still really engaging - it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.
You get all these French directors who have all these pretty, vacuous stars of their movies - from Jean Seberg on - who have become iconic but were never really good actors.
What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.
