Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes

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.

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.

I was making a lot of independent movies before the independent movement.

Movies will end up being this esoteric art form, where only singular people will put films out in a small group of theaters.

I would certainly say that films like Time Code and the Loss of Sexual Innocence were far more rewarding to me in terms of being able to move forward as a filmmaker.

They seem much rarer now, those auteur films that come out of a director's imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.

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.

I really like Larry Clark's films, as weird as that is. I like Richard Kern films.

As soon as someone like me or David Lynch pops up everyone says hallelujah, how weird.

People know that I have a great love for cinema. Not just for commercial cinema, but for the 'cinema d'auteur.' But to me, two of the great 'auteurs' are actually actors and they both happen to be French. One is Alain Delon and the other is Jean-Paul Belmondo.

I grew up watching a lot of French cinema.

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.

Ulrik Ottinger was the most real and experimental of all the German New Wave directors. She was probably the most out-there, too. She's a fascinating artist in that world.

I went to film school, and I came in when video art was king, weird stuff was king, and there, you don't have a script as your bible.

These new-age directors like Karthik Subbaraj are bringing about a change that I want to be a part of.

You get all these French directors who have all these pretty, vacuous stars of their movies - from Jean Seberg on - who have become iconic but were never really good actors.

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

I think cinema is taken a bit more seriously in France.

I really liked the Jean-Luc Godard movie, 'Film Socialisme.'

I am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period.

When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980.

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

'Grand Illusion' and 'Rules of the Game' are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.

I'm a New Wave baby, so I got very stimulated by foreign film.

Many French directors, having now realised there was no more real criticism, that the standards of the past have gone, are very offended about the quality of film criticism.