Leos Carax Quotes

My films express me, my sense of rhythm, my sense of impact, my sense of kinetic energy. I like films to move, but I like also clear storytelling and characters, and most of all, I like authentic emotion.

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

I've always tried to create music the way Kubrick makes film, just kind of mimicking consciousness. He has a way of mimicking this greater power.

Film has its own innate poetry.

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

I can remember the moment when I suddenly felt that the camera was a living partner. I suddenly felt this is art, and the camera is a co-operative living person. After that I was extremely happy to act in films.

What I like about film is it explores imperfections.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

The text illustrates the pictures - it provides a connective tissue for me. I usually refine the text last, partly because pictures are harder to do, so it's easier to edit words - I use text as grout in between the tiles of the pictures.

I don't make films to reproduce reality.

My personal fave is 'The Japanese Wife', because I think I achieved a lot of what I wanted to do. I wanted that Japanese minimalism in the film, which I managed to get somewhat.

I want to create films that will speak to different parts of our hearts and brains, stories told from a different angle.

Lynne Ramsay's 'Ratcatcher' blew me away when it came out. When I started making short films, I would watch that film over and over again, marvelling at how that story visually unfolded.

What I like to do with every film is to bring a form, like a cinematographic proposal. If you watch 'S21,' it's a form; 'Duch, Master of the Gates of Hell' is a different proposal.

I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.

I would say that all my films have more content than a 'content-driven film.' It is not easy to make such films.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It's not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.

Always when you are doing films, the themes swallow you in one way or another.

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.

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.