Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Claire Denis
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French director Claire Denis.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.
I have very strong relationships with my actors when I'm shooting. When you love an actor's work, you always feel you have to go further, and you make several films together. One film just gives you time to get acquainted.
Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.
I'm not a tacky person, I think.
You can spend your whole life in France without ever thinking about the Legion.
I am not at all interested in theories about cinema. I am only interested in images and people and sound. I am really a very simple person.
I've never seen a world where only men were responsible for the violence, and the women were innocent. They go together. Men and women are a violent mixture.
The camera is not your eye, and it's not the eye of the audience. I don't think it's my eye, either. It belongs to the film.
We don't all look alike - some people think they're tough, some people think they're fragile - but in the end, we share a lot.
Because TV is mostly close up, it has to be fast. And because it has to be fast, you don't have time to explain completely, by a sequence shot, what's happening between people. So instead of experiencing what's happening, say, when a couple is dancing, dialogue is used to explain.
I'm not rich.
What I don't like so much is to give explanations about people's behaviour... I'm not interested in making conclusions. I would never think about myself or anyone else, 'Well, this happened, this happened, this happened, so this must be the result.' It doesn't work like that with me.
I'm tiny. I'm small.
I am always asked, 'You grew up in Africa?' Every time I introduce a film, or I'm interviewed, 'You grew up in Africa?'
I suppose I am interested in the variety of human life - how people live. I am most interested in individuals and how they respond to challenges or to difficulties or just to each other. I am curious about people.
My mother's father was from Brazil - a painter, and not a famous one - and was always broke. But he was a free spirit, a great grandfather.
I was never very interested in my own experience, I think, in fact, if my films have a common link, maybe it's being a foreigner - it's common for people who are born abroad - they don't know so well where they belong.
My grandfather died when I was 12, but I remember the sorrow of my mother. Even now, she's an old lady, but when she speaks about her father, she looks young. A love like that is undefeated, you know?
The history of colonisation cannot disappear.
When I was a child I had a nightmare, and in the morning, I asked my mother and father, 'If I kill someone, would you still love me?' My parents were very preoccupied with this, but I think I'm not the only one to ask for that - not love, but absolute fidelity.
I listen to a lot of different kinds of music.
I don't want to be mysterious.
I hate the victimization of women, always.
It's not that I don't like words. There's sometimes no need for words.
When making a film, if I feel nothing in my body, I can't work. I have to touch. I have to feel. I never stop touching.
In Kurosawa's films, the tragedy is that this strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end.
When I was doing 'Beau Travail,' I listened a lot to Benjamin Britten.
I'm a very sinister person.
When you have countries that have a lot of minerals and diamonds and oil and are in business with companies from all over the world - but these companies don't share, really, their profits - this is called post-post-colonial.
I can be unkind to someone in the street or in the subway - I'm a bad-tempered person - but I'm unable to be unkind to a character. They exist because of me, and I have responsibility for them.
Africa is no more this poor continent. It's on the march.
I always thought Vincent Lindon had a sexy body, a body you can trust, a solid body you can lean on.
I didn't foresee my career. Things happen.
I think you cannot make films without choosing everything.
For some reason, I have always been interested in the stories of people who are exiled and who are deprived of rights. My main motive to make a film is to keep the society in mind and the hospitality adhered.
Sometimes I feel like John Wayne.
My films are always looked at strangely, and there is nothing I can do about it.
I long to make films. I'm dying to be inside the next film. I always hope there will be another film.
Inside the family, you can go from hate to passivity to extreme love within the same hour.
I've heard it said many times, 'Let's work on the look of the film,' but that doesn't work with me.
I am the eldest child; it's lonely at the top.
'White Material' is about courage and craziness.
I can't imagine a society with absolutely no solidarity. For me, it's a nightmare. And I don't want to live in a place like that.
The cinema should be human and be part of people's lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me.
I always thought of Djibouti as a place where human history hasn't really begun yet - or perhaps it's already over. There's something in the landscape that's stronger than human civilisation. There's no agriculture, for example, and there are live volcanoes.
'Chocolat' was a sort of statement of my own childhood, recognizing I experienced something from the end of the colonial era and the beginning of independence as I was a child that really made me aware of things I never forgot - a sort of childhood that made me different when I was a student in France.
Shoes have a meaning.
I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature - my brain is.
I reproach so many things about my family, but on the other hand, I kept asking them to be my family.
Making pizza is a great job. All that kneading the dough - everything to do with cooking is wonderful, sensual.
I don't remember being afraid of anything in making films.
You don't grow up naive in Africa.
Life is not better and more moral than it was in the '50s. It's just the same.
I'm not witty.
I really started watching films when I was 14. As I became a teenager, there was nothing that really interested me apart from music, books and films.
The only thing I find interesting is self-interest.
A father who sees his daughter leave in the arms of another man does not feel the same as a mother. It is heartrending for her, too. But it is not the same.
There seem to be more women producers than men.
What I like is the idea of a group, even if it's just two people - the idea of solitude within a group.
Marguerite Duras was a very good friend of mine and an intellectual hero. She was also a sort of mother figure. Of course she was an influence.
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