“He has Van Goghs ear for music.”

“He has Van Gogh's ear for music.”

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.”

“Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.”

“Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.”

“France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can't tear the toilet paper.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“Of course, you could, no doubt, call my going to film school the biggest mistake I ever made.”

“I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don't want.”

“In feature films the director is God in documentary films God is the director.”

“The dangerous temptation of wildlife films is that they can lull us into thinking we can get by without the original models -- that we might not need animals in the flesh.”

“Women think in [Douglas] Sirks films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk the...”

“The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second”