Godard Quotes

I consider my films first and foremost to be dramas about individuals in personal struggles and I consider myself to be a dramatist before I am a political filmmaker. I`m interested in alternative points of view. I think ultimately the problems of the planet are universal and that nationalism is a very destructive force. I also like anarchy in films. My heroes were Buñuel and Godard. Breathless was one of the first pictures I really remember being marked by, because of the speed and energy. They say I`m unsubtle. But we need above all, a theatre that wakes us up: nerves and heart.

People like Truffaut, Lelouch and Godard are like little kids playing at being revolutionaries. I`ve passed through this stage. I lived in a country where these things happened seriously.

(On shooting in London, 2004) In the United States things have changed a lot, and it`s hard to make good small films now. There was a time in the 1950s when I wanted to be a playwright, because until that time movies, which mostly came out of Hollywood, were stupid and not interesting. Then we started to get wonderful European films, and American films started to grow up a little bit, and the industry became more fun to work in than the theatre. I loved it. But now it`s taken a turn in the other direction and studios are back in command and are not that interested in pictures that make only a little bit of money. When I was younger, every week we`d get a Federico Fellini or an Ingmar Bergman or a Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, but now you almost never get any of that. Filmmakers like myself have a hard time. The avaricious studios couldn`t care less about good films - if they get a good film they`re twice as happy, but money-making films are their goal. They only want these $100-million pictures that make $500 million. That`s why I`m happy to work in London, because I`m right back in the same kind of liberal creative attitude that I`m used to.

Godard is incredibly brilliant, the things he says. Apparently here in France, the most interesting thing when a new film of his is going to come out are his press conferences, because he`s so brilliant.

(on Jean-Luc Godard) I`ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He`s made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis (1966), was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring.

I was six years old when I saw my first Godard movie, eight when I first experienced Bergman. I wanted to be a director when I was fourteen.

I grew up in the heat of 70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art. My film is emotional rather than meta, and that`s my rebellion.

A lot of films made me love the movies, everything from Hitchcock to Godard. But the ones that really grabbed me were Costa-Gavras`s films like Z" and "State of Siege.""

I don`t think you work with Godard, you experience... Doing a movie with Godard - I have done two, which means I have spent almost two years with him - it`s more like doing an incomparable experience. Just watching Godard - it`s a gift for an actress to make films with him. When I say you don`t work with Godard I mean that you don`t go through any classical path where you build a character. With Godard it`s degree zero - you don`t do anything, it`s a very strange feeling. And yet it is acting - it`s very highly stylised and he`s very directive. The reason is always very precise, there is never any improvisation. I think, finally, he manages to get everybody to talk like him. It`s true! He always wants to close the sense at the end of a line. He closes the sense. It`s very strange. You can`t say, "I`m doing a Godard and I`m playing a prostitute," because Godard is so far away from any assembly of images you may have about that character. That`s why he`s a great director - more than a great director, a great thinker of cinema.

(Thoughts on the one film (or films) that made him want to become a filmmaker and why): There was no epiphany from one film. There were a few that stood out over the years. I was 8 when I saw _Ladri di biciclette (1948)_, and it was the first black-and-white film I had ever seen. It triggered my curiosity to start seeing European cinema. When I was 7, I saw The Making of `Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid` (1970). Hearing George Roy Hill talk about all the choices he made, I knew that directing movies was what I wanted to do. I remember seeing Death and Venice 40 times one year, and then switching my allegiance to Godard after seeing Masculine/Feminine! I knew early on that I was a nerd and that films were my refuge. Those first few minutes before the lights went off, and you`re alone in the theater waiting, were really pleasurable. Whether it was Steve McQueen, the coolest guy in cinema, to Robert Altman`s strange and wonderful 3 Women (1977), I saw hundreds of films before I ever picked up a camera. I believe I took something away from each one.

Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good Kung Fu film.