Claire Denis Quotes

I’m not a very brave person.

There seem to be more women producers than men.

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.

I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.

I’m an anxious person. What I like best is to smoke cigarettes and listen to music. A perfect day for me is a day with coffee, cigarettes, and music, to quote Jim Jarmusch.

‘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.

In Kurosawa’s films, the tragedy is that this strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end.

I hate the idea of growing accustomed to someone and being faithful.

Filmmaking is to me very similar to being in a cafГ© somewhere in Paris and looking at the people walking by.

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.

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.

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.

Life is not better and more moral than it was in the ’50s. It’s just the same.

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.

I’ve heard it said many times, ‘Let’s work on the look of the film,’ but that doesn’t work with me.

When I was doing ‘Beau Travail,’ I listened a lot to Benjamin Britten.

I hate family pressures and family responsibilities. I’m more comfortable as a stranger. I always imagined I could just live in a hotel. I’m afraid of family.

I don’t remember being afraid of anything in making films.

I always scout locations first. The apartments, the railway tracks, the cafГ©, the canal – I figure out the geography of the film.

I’m not witty.

Sometimes I feel like John Wayne.

Africa is no more this poor continent. It’s on the march.

Inside the family, you can go from hate to passivity to extreme love within the same hour.

Freedom is not having a big budget.

I didn’t foresee my career. Things happen.

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.

Growing up outside your own country makes you feel that you don’t belong when you return, so you feel free to make friends with whomever you like.

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 don’t think I see the way bodies move in any special way. People say I do, but everybody moves. I don’t see why all of a sudden I’m a specialist in the way bodies move.

I am the eldest child; it’s lonely at the top.

It’s not that I don’t like words. There’s sometimes no need for words.

I reproach so many things about my family, but on the other hand, I kept asking them to be my family.

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 don’t know – music in film, for me, is not another part of a soundtrack; it is something that also helps to approach a character, to foresee the type of image – you see what I mean – it’s like a part of the process.

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.

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.

Shoes have a meaning.

I long to make films. I’m dying to be inside the next film. I always hope there will be another film.

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.

‘White Material’ is about courage and craziness.

I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature – my brain is.

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.

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.

I’ve experienced love and ambition and desire in my life, but never in the same way as in a family.

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.