Haruki Murakami Quotes

I love beautiful black-and-white movies - anything Bette Davis, especially 'Now', 'Voyager', 'Casablanca', 'Mildred Pierce'; anything by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or Godard; and 'Paper Moon' by Peter Bogdanovich.

For me, the French new wave is Truffaut and Rohmer. Godard I sometimes have trouble with because he's very much of a director's director. I feel Truffaut is such a humanist, and I always go in that direction.

I love 'Breathless,' and 'Paris, Texas,' and 'Badlands.' I was obsessed with those films in my teens. I remember watching 'Badlands' and being amazed that there were these scenes in which nobody said anything and the silence told the whole story.

I love black-and-white movies that are about contemporary subjects.

I was watching Orson Welles and Jean Vigo films at a ridiculously young age.

I have been a long time fan of Jean-Luc Godard. It's my dream to work with him.

I grew up watching a lot of Italian and French movies, so I want to have that '70s look, in my dream movie. I want that thing that's not so much happening now, that's existentialist.

I am more of an old black and white movies fan.

It seemed like my professional life would take a more scientific route. I guess that plan started to become undone when, at the age of 17, I happened upon a screening of Alain Resnais' 'Hiroshima Mon Amour,' and it took my breath away.

I can't stop watching black and white movies. I live in a world of Warner Brothers movies and all of that stuff from an older era, and I love them. I still love them. When I look at them, I sometimes think I was born in the wrong time.

I loved all movies, literally. I certainly loved 'Shane' and 'Roxie Hart.' Later on, when I was less of a kid, I loved 'L'Avventura' and 'Persona' and all Fellini movies and like everybody else I loved John Ford. Then and now, I loved Preston Sturges, maybe above anyone.

I always loved Japanese movies. And they had an enormous impact in France - the Nouvelle Vague took so much from them. It taught us how the camera was placed in the centre of the action.

Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but black and white films still hold an affectionate place in my heart; they have an incomparable mystique and mood.

Usually in France we prefer to say bad things about the Nouvelle Vague, but I'm always impressed with its freedom and the fact of not making a film to give your opinion but just as a piece of art, which to me means the Nouvelle Vague.

French cinema has always been very interesting, and it's still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it's great to still have a cinema that doesn't try to emulate, for example, American cinema.

If the purpose of the stumpy little NFT theatre under Waterloo Bridge is not to acquaint young audiences with Ozu, with Ophuels, with D. W. Griffith and with Agnes Varda, then what exactly does it exist for?

I was in college in the sixties when movies really got good. I'm a fan of Bergman and Hitchcock and Polanski and Antonioni. Those are my gods.

Old film-noir movies. There's something comforting about watching black-and-white movies, and hearing this kind of music just puts me in a fantasy world. It's a really great escape for me.

I love... anything in black and white. Just put it on the TV, I'll watch.

I think Ingmar Bergman, Francoise Truffaut - all these people created images in my mind, beautiful pictures, I loved what was known at that time as the foreign film.

What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

With the black and white films, one was concerned with tone.

I was a young film student around the time of the new wave in film in the 1970s; old Hollywood was naff and over. For me, as a film student, I was going to see French and Italian cinema; American cinema was 'Easy Rider' and 'Taxi Driver.' Everything was gritty.

One of my favourite movies is Billy Wilder's 'The Apartment.' It's shot in super wide screen, and it's beautiful.

The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.