Isabelle Huppert Quotes

You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.

My two great loves when I'm shooting are working with great actors and composing images.

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

I mean, '8½' to me is such a great dissertation on the whole, you know, act of filmmaking and creativity.

So I used formal techniques to make the film more perceptive emotionally.

Directing is its own monster with its own set of muscles and exercises.

I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people.

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.

A great movie evolves when everybody has the same vision in their heads.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

I'm not a cinephile. My films don't reference films. I'm more interested in rhythm and feeling.

I just see myself as a guy who's trying to make a film or, make art.

I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?'

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

Films are not mathematics - that's the first thing you need to understand. At least, that's how I feel. They are not words on paper. Films are made with people, with teams and with individual bundles of creativity coming together to fulfill the vision of an individual who is the director of the film.

I found it very difficult to explain to someone why you did a film. It's not like having a conversation.

The director's task is to recreate life, its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen, even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable.

In some ways any film that you do has an artificiality about it. Even when you're doing the most kitchen-sinky, gritty, realistic scene you've still got 50 people standing around watching you with cameras and lights and things.

I realised that there's a more muscular approach to film-making that I found very inspiring.

I love David Fincher - even though it was just two scenes, I loved the way we worked and could tell by the way he was shooting it that this was going to be an affective movie to say the least.

Every film starts with two or three images. Then I try to edit these images.

The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?

I don't approach films purely in context of genre.

TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.