-
I've been recording forever. I'm a watcher. I'm a stalker. I love everything about people. It's always been a passion for me to observe.
-
I feel like Adele is a diva. Not in the bad way. She is one of the greatest voices of this industry and of her own art. What she offers is so unique that she's risen to such a status that very few artists can enjoy.
-
I have struggles in screenwriting that lead me to a third act that's always more or less efficiently wrapped up in a fourth act that's trying to give closure to too many things.
-
I plough all my money into my next film, so I never actually have any money. It's always invisible.
-
Six years, I didn't act. Then I wrote myself a role - I won prizes all over the world.
-
I don't think the way I portray mother's and son's relationships has anything to do with my age or generation. It has to do with what I lived with my own mother and what it's transformed into and the point of view it has given me on mothers and women. The way I was brought up with women. It's all about personal background.
-
The motivation for making movies is that people actually see them.
-
It was a privilege to direct the music video for Adele's beautiful, heartbreaking song, 'Hello.' When I first heard it, all the images appeared clearly in my head - and her trust and generosity allowed me to work with abandon artistically and emotionally, like she always does. It made me extremely proud.
-
The father figure doesn't impress me. I have a very friendly relationship with my father, but that wasn't always the case. My mother had custody, and I only saw him every other weekend. I never knew him well enough for him to inspire me.
-
I think great artists have no time to waste with having disproportionate egos and irrational requests. They're too focused on their work to actually lose themselves in hysterical spirals where they become monsters or tyrants.
-
My extreme characters are in a state of rebellion or who are being ostracized or being misunderstood, or misfits or trying to fit in and fighting for their rights to love, live, and co-exist. They sort of mirror my own demons.
-
The problems I have with a flawed script are always revealed in the editing room.
-
To me, the idea of success is to be able to work with people you admire.
-
When I first got to Cannes, I was very insecure about everything, so I put on this extravagant facade. Can you blame me? I was 19.
-
Cinema is a thankless industry where sometimes to appear on the cinematic scenery is a thing for late bloomers and people who are very patient. The places are accounted, and the space is often unwelcoming. Money is rare, and independent voices are muted by the almost complete absence of risk takers.
-
When I saw Bryan Singer's 'Usual Suspects,' I knew how it was going to end because I'd seen 'Scary Movie.' Which is not the preferred order of things, but that's how it is because my childhood was 'Home Alone,' 'Matilda,' 'Batman Returns,' 'Jumanji,' 'Secret Garden,' 'Jack,' 'Mrs. Doubtfire,' 'Titanic.' Only family films from the '90s.
-
I got a part in a package of commercials for this big drugstore from the age of 6 to 10. For four years I shot those commercials, and old ladies would stop me on the street and grab my cheeks. That's how it started.
-
It's important to see how people see your work and how they feel about it. I know a lot of directors who are like, 'I never read reviews,' and I'm like, 'Yeah I can tell.'
-
I have a strange relationship with influences because mine are mostly literary or painters or poets, who I'll even quote. I don't do tributes to cinema.
-
Here's the thing with the costumes for 'Mommy': Given the background and social strata that the characters come from, you can't really imagine that they've gone shopping lately, so we went for that very normcore, fashionless era in history, the early 2000s, which was completely transitional.
-
In 'Laurence Anyways,' Nathalie Baye is Laurence's mother, and she is quite an awful mother. Still, she is the only one in the end who truly accepts her daughter.
-
Music was the only voice of cinema for a very long time before we had sound; it's organically linked to cinema itself.
-
All my life, I heard, 'Stop daydreaming,' 'Get over yourself,' 'You'll never get there,' 'Aim lower,' 'You'll hurt yourself,' from teachers, family, and friends.
-
It's ludicrous to think people work for you: 'a film by...' doesn't exist. Directed by, maybe, but it's a film from a collective, a group of people whom you consult and seek your counsel and advice and vice versa, too.