François Truffaut Quotes

Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud are my contemporaries.

Sometimes I force myself. In the case of Domicile conjugal (1970) I laid down certain laws for myself. Henri Langlois, who loved Baisers volés (1968), said to me, `Now you have to get Jean-Pierre Léaud and Claude Jade married.`

"Is the cinema more important than life ?"

"I have always preferred the reflect of the life to life itself"

"Film lovers are sick people."

"Some day I`ll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste."

"Taste is a result of a thousand distastes."

Originally, I didn`t like (John Ford)--because of his material: for example, the comic secondary characters, the brutality, the male-female relationships typified by the man`s slapping the woman on the backside. But eventually I came to understand that he had achieved an absolute uniformity of technical expertise. And his technique is the more admirable for being unobtrusive: His camera is invisible; his staging is perfect; he maintains a smoothness of surface in which no one scene is allowed to become more important than any other. Such mastery is possible only after one has made an enormous number of films. Questions of quality aside, John Ford is the Georges Simenon of directors.

One looks at films differently when one is a director or a critic. For example, though I have always loved Citizen Kane (1941), I loved it in different ways at different stages of my career. When I saw it as a critic, I particularly admired the way the story is told: the fact that one is rarely permitted to see the person who interviews all the characters, the fact that chronology is not respected, things like that. As a director I cared more about technique: all the scenes are shot in a single take and do not use reverse cutting; in most scenes you hear the soundtrack before you see the corresponding images - that reflects Orson Welles` radio training, etc. Behaving like the ordinary spectator, one uses a film as if it were a drug; he is dazed by the motion and doesn`t try to analyze. A critic, on the other hand, is forced to write summaries of films in 15 lines. That forces one to apprehend the structure of a film and to rationalize his liking for it.

"I make films that I would like to have seen when I was a young man."

When I first saw Citizen Kane (1941), I was certain that never in my life had I loved a person the way I loved that film.

Cinema is an improvement on life.

(on Jean-Pierre Leaud) The most interesting actor of his generation.

The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary.

The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has.

Is the cinema more important than life?

The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it`s just wonderful.

I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.

In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs.

The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.

An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal - falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox.

I`ve always had the impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless, daily but necessary job.

Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings.