When I was 16, I felt very relieved to discover cinema. It was like an island where I could see life and death from another perspective. Every young person should be interested in that island. It's a beautiful place.Collection: Death
I travel, I read, I write, I have other lives. But when I have a camera, I know that's my country, my island.Collection: Travel
We all get a little tired of being ourselves sometimes. The answer is to reinvent yourself, but how do you do that and what is the cost?
I changed my name when I was 13. I don't know why but it made sense at the time. I wanted another identity. I wanted to reinvent myself.
When I was 16, I discovered this island called cinema and I thought: 'Oh, how wonderful; I'm ready.'
When I made my first film, I had hardly ever seen a camera before, and I was a young man when I arrived in Paris from the suburbs. At the time, I didn't talk much. I was very shy, so the bluff served me. I was telling people that I had no money, and that I knew how to make films, but I had no proof.
My films start with images, a few images and a few feelings, and I try to edit them together to see the correspondence between these images and these feelings.
I'm not a cineaste. I've made so few films. Sometimes it feels each one is the last one or the first one.
Cinema is a territory. It exists outside of movies. It's a place I live in. It's a way of seeing things, of experiencing life. But making films, that's supposed to be a profession.
I've always been interested in invisible worlds, and I like to visit digital worlds, you know, any world that's imposed on us.
I'm not against the virtual world; it's fascinating, but I don't like the way they try to impose it on us. It's a thing imposed by rich countries.
The virtual world is not the enemy. The pioneers invented a world they believed in, but the followers must follow that world whether they believe in it or not.
I like tragedies, whether they're sci-fi or something else, but I can't say I know much about any genre in particular.
There's a real cowardice in the movie business. If you don't meet the right crazy people, you can't do it.
I thank Henry James for the scene in the hotel room, that I stole from Portrait Of A Lady… This particular scene is the most beautiful scene ever written.Collection: Beautiful
It's incredible how much cinema can do. We forget.Collection: Cinema
When I was 16 I discovered this island called cinema and I thought: 'Oh how wonderful, I'm ready.Collection: Islands
The film is therefore a form of science fiction, in which humans, beasts and machines are on the verge of extinction - 'sacred motors' linked together by a common fate and solidarity, slaves to an increasingly virtual world. A world from which visible machines, real experiences and actions are gradually disappearing.Collection: Real