Through most of my career, I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.

One has to change one's life. Maybe this is easier for people who have nothing to do than for those who have something to do.

Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.

Why did they go to Hollywood? Because they could get access to the American financial sector. The Jews were neither authorized to be bankers or doctors nor lawyers or professors. That's why they concentrated on something new: cinema.

The Rolling Stones are much more accomplished than Jefferson Airplane, who are more like tribal people. That is, they present something which exists: The music and the hippie.

We were for Mao, but when we saw the films he was making, they were bad. So we understood that there was necessarily something wrong with what he was saying.

Three-quarters of directors waste four hours on a shot that requires five minutes of actual directing. I prefer to have five minutes' work for the crew - and keep the three hours to myself for thought.

The idea is to make the script out of a political analysis and then to convey that - sometimes in poetry, sometimes science, sometimes all it takes is a film. The film itself is less and less spectacular because I think very strongly now the more spectacular you are, the more you are absorbed by the things you are trying to destroy.

When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn't stand up for them.

The history of cinema appears to be easy to do, since it is, after all, made up of images; cinema appears to be the only medium where all one has to do is re-project these images so that one can see what has happened.