Quotes

[on James Cameron] Cameron isn't evil, he's not an asshole like Spielberg. He wants to be the new De Mille. Unfortunately, he can't direct his way out of a paper bag.

[on All About Eve (1950)] I still think that Eve is a failed Broadway piece and that it's not for nothing that he [Joseph L. Mankiewicz] left after the first scene of [Jean] Cocteau's Monstres sacrés (which by the way is not a good Cocteau film) because as I see it, the first scene is so powerful that one cannot write the ending or, if one does, one is doomed to churn out a scenario à la Bernstein. Either one drops the subject, or one ends up with something as bad as the third act of Monstres sacrés or the final scenes between [George] Sanders and Anne Baxter, of which I have a horrific memory. The truth is, I really liked Mankiewicz's films from the 50s, and when I saw some of them again, it was maybe in passionate circumstances ... I know that was the case for Eve.

[on television] I have no relation with television. It's not a willed refusal. First, because I'm never at home; there too, it's a question of lifestyle. I have on occasion seen films on television at friends' homes, and since I'm not used to it, I've always had the impression that I was not watching the film, that I was seeing something else, a reflection . . . It was not a real connection! I agree with what [Jean] Eustache says, television is great for a second viewing, but not for discovering a film. It's a bit like seeing a film again on the editing table. And when I speak with people who've seen on television a film I saw earlier on the screen, I always have the impression that they haven't seen quite the same film, but maybe that's wrong.

People who go to, say, one film every two weeks and tell themselves, "I will see the great films, but not the others, not the commercial movies," I think those people have no chance of really seeing cinema. I think that cinema is only accessible to those who accept that they must consume the "mainstream." On the other hand, the consumers of mainstream cinema who reject [Marguerite] Duras, [Robert] Bresson, [Jean-Marie] Straub or [Werner] Schroeter, are also people who refuse cinema. That said, it's a question of lifestyle: there are those whose daily schedule includes two hours to watch a movie, others who prefer to read, or listen to music.

[on The Night of the Hunter (1955)]The most seductive one-shot in the history of movies. What can you say? It's the greatest amateur film ever made.