Quotes

A Prophet (2009) is maybe the point at which I began to feel uncomfortable with the French casting system. I felt like I needed to direct other faces, other skin colors, other ways of speaking and thinking, other forms of expression from what we are used to seeing.[2015]

I really believe the form of the film must be in the scenario; cinema is not just added value to the scripting. I believe in it as a totality. There was a specific problem with this film, which we saw often during the writing: the clash between realism and stylisation. You had constantly to be looking for an equilibrium. If it's too realistic, it's boring. If it's too stylised, you don't believe it.[2012]

You need something to say about the place where you make films. I know Europe. The US I don't know so well. I need a film that sees something, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) did for Miloš Forman. It makes it worth the trip.[2012]

[on Dheepan (2015)] What interested me was the position of someone different in society. How the people who sell us roses when we're sitting in a cafe live and where they come from. If it helps their situation, then so much the better.[2015]

[on Marion Cotillard] For me she's almost like an actress of the silent cinema, like Louise Brooks. And she's also fearless, she throws herself into scenes - literally.

[press conference for Paris, 13th District (2021) at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival] These are young kids, young adults in fact, they're about 30 years old or more, they have lots of diplomas, they're unemployed, they find it difficult to find accommodation, and I wanted to talk about this middle class - young, well-educated kids who're having trouble finding their way in life. People usually talk about the down-and-out, these people are not that at all - they're not down-and-out. I chose the 13th district for a very simple reason - I lived there for a long time and I know the district well. It's one of the districts in Paris that's changed most over the last 10 or 15 years; there's really been a lot of town-planning, there's a typical architecture and this is true only of this district - it's a very concentrated place between the banks of the Seine and the top of Place d'Italie and in between there's this area called the Olympiades where the architecture is absolutely stunning - Houellebecq wrote about this area, so it's not an unknown place in Paris. What I really like is that it's a district which depicts the modern era in Paris. I've shot a lot of films in Paris and it's a difficult city to film - things are fairly low-lying and then you end up in museum-like areas of Paris, but the 13th district has really emerged and it's quite magnificent; there all classes of society mixed together in that neighbourhood and it seems more real than many other districts of Paris.

[press conference for Emilia Pérez (2024) at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival] The first lockdown did really serve a purpose - I read a novel by Boris Razon called Écoute and there was a chapter that talked about a narco-trafficker who wanted to change identity. This was not much developed in the novel, so I just developed that idea in my film. It occurred to me as a kind of an opera and it took time to turn into a film.

[Cannes press conference for Emilia Pérez (2024)] I was asked how this project came about. I said yes, it's an opera, but why in Mexico and why in Spanish? Something shocks me deeply in Mexico - all these problems of missing people and femicides are awful. There are whole regions where you can't go because they're unsafe and the crumbling of democracy is unbearable for me. I wanted to make a musical, I wanted people to sing and dance, so why not against the background of a tragedy?

[Cannes press conference for Emilia Pérez (2024)] I make films so that I'm not alone. I usually work with a co-writer, the other team, the actors and actresses. It can only be a collective piece of work. The sum of the angles is greater than the triangle. When we're all together the ideas are exchanged and take form, that's how I view matters. If I make films it's to meet people, to be with people, otherwise I'd be very solitary, I'd be a misanthropist.