A Quote by Jacques Audiard

The cinema that interests me departs from realism. — © Jacques Audiard
The cinema that interests me departs from realism.
Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite. The only true cinema verite would be what Andy Warhol did with his film about the Empire State Building - eight hours or so from one angle, and even then it's not really cinema verite, because you aren't actually there.
I was seduced by the nouvelle vague, because it was really reinventing everything. And the Italian cinema that one would see in the theaters in the late '50s, early '60s was Italian comedy, Italian style, which, to me, was like the end of neo-realism. I think cinema all over the world was influenced by it, which was Italy finding its freedom at the end of fascism, the end of the Nazi invasion. It was a kind of incredible energy. Then, late '50s, early '60s, the neo-realism lost its great energy and became comedy.
I gravitate much more toward realism, realism in the work that I do, but magical realism got me hooked on film. I think it was my first time realizing that there was something besides popcorn movies.
What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.
Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite.
I acknowledge Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. They are prostlytizers of English socialism preaching to the converted and telling us what we already know. Cinema is best served away from documentary neo-realism. I come from a tradition of post-post-Italian neo-realism in England, where we've produced the best television in the world. But to paraphrase Truffaut, the English have no visual imagination.
All I want to do is realism and follow the tradition of realism. And explore what realism should be now be after the ubiquity of smartphones. I'm trying to answer the question. I don't think I'll ever have the words, but hopefully I'll have a few images.
I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention.
It didn't even occur to me that I could use my strong image in cinema to propagate my political ideas. To me, cinema was cinema and politics was politics.
Realism is a philosophy as opposed to a style. For me, painting is about observing and recording my existence as accurately as I can, it's my way of understanding the world around me and staying constantly engaged with it, the more carefully and patiently I look at what interests me in the world the more faithfully and honestly I can document it. It is only through intense, subtly nuanced observation that we develop an understanding of the psychology of the subject.
When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.
My interests still are my interests. That doesn't make me a bad mother. I think that makes me a really good mother, because when I go and creatively satisfy myself and those interests, I come home satisfied.
People know that I have a great love for cinema. Not just for commercial cinema, but for the “cinema d’auteur.” But to me, two of the great “auteurs” are actually actors and they both happen to be French. One is Alain Delon and the other is Jean-Paul Belmondo.
There is no realism in American films. No realism, but something much better, great truth.
For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.
Look at what realists have done for us. They have led us to war and climate change, poverty on an unimaginable scale, and wholesale ecological destruction. Half of humanity goes to bed hungry because of all the realistic leaders in the world. I tell people who call me 'unrealistic' to show me what their realism has done. Realism is an outdated, overplayed and wholly exaggerated concept.
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