“For some reason, I have always been interested in the stories of people who are exiled and who are deprived of rights. My main motive to make a film is to keep the society in mind and the hospitality adhered.”
― Claire Denis
“The cinema should be human and be part of people’s lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me.”
― Claire Denis
“Sometimes bleak is good. Sometimes bleak is necessary. Some part of life is always bleak.”
― Claire Denis
“I am not at all interested in theories about cinema. I am only interested in images and people and sound. I am really a very simple person.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“When I was doing ‘Beau Travail,’ I listened a lot to Benjamin Britten.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“Filmmaking creates a sort of – trust, maybe. It has led me to a group of people I feel good with. We have something in common because of film, when otherwise we might have nothing.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“Africa is no more this poor continent. It’s on the march.”
― Claire Denis
“You can spend your whole life in France without ever thinking about the Legion.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“What I like is the idea of a group, even if it’s just two people – the idea of solitude within a group.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“I always thought Vincent Lindon had a sexy body, a body you can trust, a solid body you can lean on.”
― Claire Denis
“In Kurosawa’s films, the tragedy is that this strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end.”
― Claire Denis
“I’m not witty.”
― Claire Denis
“I’m a very sinister person.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“I hate the victimization of women, always.”
― Claire Denis
“I think you cannot make films without choosing everything.”
― Claire Denis
“Shoes have a meaning.”
― Claire Denis
“I’m not a tacky person, I think.”
― Claire Denis
“Life is not better and more moral than it was in the ’50s. It’s just the same.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“I listen to a lot of different kinds of music.”
― Claire Denis
“I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.”
― Claire Denis
“My films are always looked at strangely, and there is nothing I can do about it.”
― Claire Denis
“I’m not rich.”
― Claire Denis
“I long to make films. I’m dying to be inside the next film. I always hope there will be another film.”
― Claire Denis
“I’ve heard it said many times, ‘Let’s work on the look of the film,’ but that doesn’t work with me.”
― Claire Denis
“You don’t grow up naive in Africa.”
― Claire Denis
“I’m tiny. I’m small.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“I didn’t foresee my career. Things happen.”
― Claire Denis
“I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature – my brain is.”
― Claire Denis
“My grandfather died when I was 12, but I remember the sorrow of my mother. Even now, she’s an old lady, but when she speaks about her father, she looks young. A love like that is undefeated, you know?”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“Because TV is mostly close up, it has to be fast. And because it has to be fast, you don’t have time to explain completely, by a sequence shot, what’s happening between people. So instead of experiencing what’s happening, say, when a couple is dancing, dialogue is used to explain.”
― Claire Denis
“We don’t all look alike – some people think they’re tough, some people think they’re fragile – but in the end, we share a lot.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“Inside the family, you can go from hate to passivity to extreme love within the same hour.”
― Claire Denis
“I reproach so many things about my family, but on the other hand, I kept asking them to be my family.”
― Claire Denis
“I don’t remember being afraid of anything in making films.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“There seem to be more women producers than men.”
― Claire Denis
“’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.”
― Claire Denis
“I am always asked, ‘You grew up in Africa?’ Every time I introduce a film, or I’m interviewed, ‘You grew up in Africa?’”
― Claire Denis
“I am the eldest child; it’s lonely at the top.”
― Claire Denis
“I can’t imagine a society with absolutely no solidarity. For me, it’s a nightmare. And I don’t want to live in a place like that.”
― Claire Denis
“Sometimes I feel like John Wayne.”
― Claire Denis
“The history of colonisation cannot disappear.”
― Claire Denis
“Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.”
― Claire Denis
“I can be unkind to someone in the street or in the subway – I’m a bad-tempered person – but I’m unable to be unkind to a character. They exist because of me, and I have responsibility for them.”
― Claire Denis
“’White Material’ is about courage and craziness.”
― Claire Denis
“I don’t want to be mysterious.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“A film takes a lot of time, and yet not enough to share with the people you’re making the movie with, I think.”
― Claire Denis
“In a way, I feel obliged to respect Jean Rouch because I am told he is very important.”
― Claire Denis
“I think working as an assistant was a part of knowing people who like cinema, and to learn from a movie, you have to watch it.”
― Claire Denis
“It’s not that I don’t like words. There’s sometimes no need for words.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“I’m not a very brave person.”
― Claire Denis
“I’ve experienced love and ambition and desire in my life, but never in the same way as in a family.”
― Claire Denis
“A career for me is something like building a bridge. You know, where to put the lifts. You have a plan. I have a blueprint for each film, but not for my life.”
― Claire Denis
“Making pizza is a great job. All that kneading the dough – everything to do with cooking is wonderful, sensual.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“I have no relationship to the French bourgeoisie. I don’t like connecting with them.”
― Claire Denis
“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.”
― Claire Denis
“I hate the idea of growing accustomed to someone and being faithful.”
― Claire Denis
“The only thing I find interesting is self-interest.”
― Claire Denis
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