Top 19 Quotes & Sayings by Jean Renoir

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French director Jean Renoir.

Last updated on September 19, 2024.

Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His films La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. He was ranked by the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of critics in 2002 as the fourth greatest director of all time. Among numerous honours accrued during his lifetime, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975 for his contribution to the motion picture industry. Renoir was the son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the uncle of the cinematographer Claude Renoir. He was one of the first filmmakers to be known as an auteur.

French - Director | September 15, 1894 - February 12, 1979

Source: Wikipedia

Wilshire Boulevard... It has no smell to it.

Jean Renoir

Is it possible to succeed without any act of betrayal?

Jean Renoir

A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.

Jean Renoir

Nature is millions of things. And there are millions of ways of understanding its preoccupations.

Jean Renoir

You see, in this world there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.

Jean Renoir

Everyone has his reasons.

Jean Renoir

A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.

Jean Renoir

The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.

Jean Renoir

The advantage of being eighty years old is that one has many people to love.

Jean Renoir

I am against great themes and great subjects... You can't film an idea. The camera is an instrument for recording physical impact.

Jean Renoir

When a friend speaks to me, whatever he says is interesting.

Jean Renoir

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

Jean Renoir

To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.

Jean Renoir

The foundation of all civilization is loitering.

Jean Renoir

The saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man.

Jean Renoir

The real hell of life is that everyone has his reasons.

Jean Renoir

The only things that are important in life are the things you remember.

Jean Renoir