- [on his cinema] I don't want it to look like life. I want it to actually be life. Real moments of life, that's what I'm after.
- [on the making of Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013)] I never showed anyone a lack of respect. I might have shouted sometimes because I thought I'd get somewhere by raising my voice - but I never called anyone names. Either you want to make something that's prefabricated, mapped out, pre-programmed - or you see cinema as a real opportunity to create, like painting or literature. I'm just normally demanding. In France, you'd say extremely demanding. Because we French spend our time whingeing and moaning. In any other country, I'd be considered perfectly normal when it comes to work.
- [on Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013)] My aim was to let my intuition guide me so that these two people would not be seen as two women, but just two people. Very quickly I forgot the fact that these were two women, just as the crew and everyone else involved in the creation of this film forgot that aspect of it. It was really a film about two people having to go through a relationship which everyone knew would lead to a breakup and the pain that that entails. Anybody can see that story, what leads to that, and identify with it. As a filmmaker, I wanted to construct this identification process with the characters so that you fully connect to their emotions and what their breakup represents. I was taken aback to what degree the film ended up being about suffering and pain. I had started out with the intent to make a love story and something not so grave or so dark. But it really became about that, about the suffering of this breakup. My previous film, Black Venus (2010), had been very emotionally draining and difficult because I had identified so much with the lead character. So I went into this saying, "I want to do a love story, not to be seen with rose-colored glasses, but not as heavy." As it turned out, it surprised me the place where it led actually was something so painful. I identified so much with them that I experienced a lot of that suffering as well.
- [2013 interview on Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013)] I'm very upset that Léa Seydoux doesn't want to work with me again, it was such a dream for me to work with her. No, but really, it was good that Léa realised that she couldn't work with me again, and that she came right out and said it. As for Adèle [Adèle Exarchopoulos], that wasn't so great a dream for me as working with Léa. She's still young. I'll wait and see how she evolves as an actor and as a personality. Because you can get lost in that profession, and I hope she doesn't.
- [on Black Venus (2010)] I really felt it was the film of my life, and it didn't come off.
- [2017, on his decision to auction off his Palme d'Or for Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013)] I do not need Gilles Jacob's blessing when I make a decision. I would rather think it is for him to explain the meaning of this secret ceremony he organized to award the two actresses with two other Palmes d'Or, declaring that they were 'in a small way also the directors of the film,' even though they had publicly insulted me. Does he really think that a director can accept such a disparagement? Why was I not invited to this ceremony? It is very strange. Is it possible to have three Palmes for one film? Who decreed this new rule and on the strength of what? Can one go around giving Palmes on a whim just because one presides over a festival? In that case, why did the Dardenne brothers get only one Palme? Why is this the only film in 70 years to receive three Palmes? What is the real meaning of this triple Palme d'Or? For me, liberating myself from this Palme d'Or is a way of washing my hands of this sorry affair.
- [speaking about Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (2019) at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival] The most important thing for me, and this is something I want to say right away, was to celebrate life, love, desire, breath, music, the body....I wanted to try a cinematographic experience that would be as free as possible. What I wanted to do was to do something different actually, I wanted to search for other forms of narrative, for example, I wanted to break the rules for narrative which have been defined gradually in the history of the cinema, and these rules are difficult not to obey. I forced myself therefore to break these rules, to go beyond them. Above all however, for me, it was an experiment - an endeavour aesthetically to do something different, the film tells a lot of stories, it says a lot of things. There are many stories that link together the various characters. What I try to do is to depict the position of the artist, the poet, the photographer, who gets all these different sources of inspiration, who has so many different models.
- [when asked if he was bothered by walk-outs at Cannes for Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (2019)] No, not at all. What I tried to do is to try something different, and not everyone is open to that experiment or that new experience. Not everyone shares the way I look at others. Not everyone likes this or that kind of film. So no, it doesn't bother me in the least. If what I see is what I want to see and if that doesn't appeal to everyone, well, that's very fortunate - it would be a disaster if everybody watched a film in exactly the same way.
- [press conference for Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (2019) at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival] Obviously, I have made aesthetic choices. I tried to write the film in a given manner - maybe this is a bit pretentious, but I really needed to feel that I was in the same position as a painter, painting a model. And that's what you see in the film. I tried to move on from a prior experiment I made. I was inspired by Impressionistic painting, in fact. I wanted to express myself more through colour and through framing. In the discothèque, in the nightclub, I went from Impressionism to Cubism. I was quite inspired by the Cubist painters like the "Demoiselles d'Avignon" for example, and other paintings. Of course, this was just an attempt, I think perhaps we went further than that in our aesthetics. I've tried to show what really resonates within me - to see bodies, tummies, buttocks - there's something mysterious in the body, there's something quite fascinating with the body that puts us in a totally different state. It's different from just looking. What I've tried to do is to describe things through movement - it may look easy to you, it may appear facile what the actresses and dancers do in terms of their body movements, but they're quite exceptional, quite magical, and I wanted to film the magic of the body. It's the metaphysical dimension of the body that I've tried to portray.
- [Cannes press conference for Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (2019)] The references were mainly painting and sculpting. There are lots of different ways of filming bodies. And I've often had these sort of visions walking around Paris - if you raise your eyes in Paris, if you really look, you can see lots of beautiful sculptures, of Gods, of angels, you see all sorts of sculptures, and you see them if you look up, so I tried to film these bodies like these sculptures that you see walking around Paris - you see them from below. I was deeply inspired by any number of painters, and I've tried to draw inspiration from Picasso's colours - white, red, blue are the dominant colours in the film, and purple as well, magenta as well - those are the dominant colours in the film and you can see these colours in about a third of the film.
- [Cannes press conference for Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (2019)] There will be other characters who will be in Canto Due, and I said that this is indeed an intermezzo - it's a very free exercise in filmmaking, and I'll approach Canto Due in more of an academic way.
- [October 2022 interview, on current projects] I'm writing screenplays. I have a film project with Olivier Loustau. I'm also working on the editing of Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due and Canto Tre. Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (2019), as I had envisaged it, I prefer to leave to the side. It was conceived as an interlude, a free exercise. Each film will be separate from the other.
- [October 2022 interview, on the non-release of Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (2019)] Personally, I'm not suffering because of it. My regret is not to have shown off the actresses who were added after the first instalment of Mektoub: Marie Bernard, Dany Martial, Meleinda Elasfour. I will end up showing their work in one form or another.
- [October 2022 interview] I was wrong to have shown Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (2019) at Cannes. The film wasn't finished, wasn't mixed, wasn't totally colour-corrected. But I was so excited by the idea of showcasing the young actors and actresses, especially Roméo De Lacour, that I went along with it. I was committed to the festival. I had brought forward the time of the press screening and I had invited those people who were implicated by the scandal which had arisen to watch the film. I wasn't at all expecting that the actors most concerned in this didn't enter the screening room. I thought they were there, and for that reason I regret having shown the film at Cannes. If I had known that they weren't in the room I would never have shown the film. A film which isn't supported or defended, when it's attacked, by those people who are most directly concerned, it can't express itself any further. There are other cuts in existence which are more accomplished and it's possible that after my death that my heirs will want to show them, but in my lifetime I don't have any wish for that.
- [October 2022 interview, on the cunnilingus scene in Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (2019)] I thought that the viewers would understand the intention of the scene. There are so many scenes in films where what happens in toilets is degrading for women. Here it's she who's in the position of dominance. The press made a big fuss out of it. I didn't understand why. I found the scene very beautiful and thought that the two actors were sublime. I wanted something which approaches what one sees on certain canvases which portray battles of Greek gods, the power of Diana and Venus which brings man back to the ground in front of her. She is on high, he is on the ground. In relation to what's been said - it's rather flattering but completely false - that this scene wasn't simulated.....I'm sorry but there was an assistant who regularly came onto the set to put sweat on the stomach. It's a scene we had worked on for a long time, which we prepared, re-did and simulated. The trick is to make it look real.
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