Top 182 Quotes & Sayings by Jean-Luc Godard

Three-quarters of directors waste four hours on a shot that requires five minutes of actual directing. I prefer to have five minutes' work for the crew - and keep the three hours to myself for thought.

Through most of my career, I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.

When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn't stand up for them.

The idea is to make the script out of a political analysis and then to convey that - sometimes in poetry, sometimes science, sometimes all it takes is a film. The film itself is less and less spectacular because I think very strongly now the more spectacular you are, the more you are absorbed by the things you are trying to destroy.

I know nothing of life except through the cinema.

A film ingeniously directed does indeed give the impression of having been laid end to end, but a film ingeniously edited gives the impression of having suppressed all direction.

People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.

I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie.

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

We were for Mao, but when we saw the films he was making, they were bad. So we understood that there was necessarily something wrong with what he was saying.

I make film to make time pass.

Once I had seen 'Journey to Italy,' I knew that, even if I were never to make movies, I could make them.

Why did they go to Hollywood? Because they could get access to the American financial sector. The Jews were neither authorized to be bankers or doctors nor lawyers or professors. That's why they concentrated on something new: cinema.

Every edit is a lie.

I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory.

The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone... means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them.

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

At the cinema, we do not think - we are thought.

The Rolling Stones are much more accomplished than Jefferson Airplane, who are more like tribal people. That is, they present something which exists: The music and the hippie.

I don't have a visa for the U.S., and I don't want to apply for one. And I don't want to fly for that long.

One has to change one's life. Maybe this is easier for people who have nothing to do than for those who have something to do.

I am trying to change the world.

More or less, I am always saying, 'Give me more. Let's do what has not been done.'

The history of cinema appears to be easy to do, since it is, after all, made up of images; cinema appears to be the only medium where all one has to do is re-project these images so that one can see what has happened.

Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.

I write and film history; I don't make it. One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.

Spielberg, like many others, wants to convince before he discusses. In that, there is something very totalitarian.

I want to be together with everyone else but stay lonely.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body - both go together, they can't be separated.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

We once believed we were auteurs, but we weren't. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It's sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.

I prefer to work when there are people against whom I have to struggle.

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.

More or less, I am always saying, 'Let's do what has not been done.'

To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.

Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second.

First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.

In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato!

Even with a small video we will always be able to do a small movie with friends and to show it to someone. You won't get the Oscar for it. But, after all, why are you writing and why are you filming?

Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.

Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

"Away, away," says hate. "Closer, closer," says love.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.

What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die.

You have to continue and discover the grammar of things, of what we can see.

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not.

Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.

When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.