- [on 'Love is Strange'] I think that all of my previous films were about the nature of love and its destructive toll on an individual. But even more, they were films of self-discovery, about people who were trying to understand who they are and what they felt about that. This is a film that begins with two men who know who they are, and face a conflict together. How they face that conflict is the story of the film and also describes their love. I've always thought of it as an epic story told in a New York apartment because it's multi-generational. It's really about all these generations and how, at each stage of our life, we know such different things.
- All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That's what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.
- [press conference for Frankie (2019) at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival] I'm 53, and for whatever reasons, until I was in my late forties, I wasn't that close to death and in the last five years I have been in a way that was very surprising, very difficult, but also what I noticed - and I was with three different women at different ages in times at which they were facing the end of their life - I noticed all the things that were unexpected, the mundane things, the funny things, the fact that life seemed to be so much stronger than death; life kept going until the very last moment. And to me, that's the definition of family - it's this connection that people have together, that holds, even when they face so much of a crisis. I also built the film for Isabelle [Isabelle Huppert] who'd I'd met three or four years ago after Love Is Strange (2014) and we wanted to do a film together and, for me, I would never do a film with Isabelle in France, because I feel that it was important to find a location and a story that was somehow separate from where she was from, and that we all as a group were on a trip together to make this film.
- In some ways all of my films could be called 'Passages.' There's no beginning and there's no ending.
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