Quotes

I started as an editor, which is very important. I am always in the cutting room. I think you can't write properly unless you are an editor. I always have the cutting in mind when I'm shooting. Very often I look at my watch and say it's good for twenty seconds and not more.

[on the starting point for Woman in Chains (1968)] In Manon (1949) it was the overcrowded train scene. I started with that. And this time I started with the end of the picture, the hallucination, the nightmare. I started with the dream and made the picture for the dream. But it's very difficult to say where an image comes from. You remember the scene in Le Corbeau (1943) where the light was going here and there? I was skiing and I fell down and lay there for five minutes. I saw the shadow going on the snow back and forth and I knew that I had to write a scene which used that image. From the black and white of the snow I thought of the swinging lamp. So you never know how an image comes.

[on Inferno (1964)] It all started with insomnia. I had this idea, which was to dramatize the feeling of anxiety which I have every night and which keeps me awake. I wrote a 50-page treatment. Well, I quickly realised, after having finished these 50 pages sadly, that it was fairly easy to convey to an audience that a character can have ten obsessions but you can't share these obsessions in two hours because they took ten years to poison this person. There's a semi-pathological side to the film. The main character is in a pathological state, but there are plenty of moments when he's normal.

[on Woman in Chains (1968)] I wanted this picture to be unbearable. I think that vice is something unbearable and we have to stand it. You can't imagine what is vice if it is bearable. For me it's hell, really. I wanted the viewers to feel this way. I like the people to be as ashamed as the girl is.

[on Alfred Hitchcock] I admire him very much and am flattered when anyone compares a film of mine to his.

[on Miquette (1950)] It is extremely difficult to adapt a light comedy created for the stage, without having to reconsider it completely. For me this was the entire problem with this film. From the moment one tries to transfer to the cinema an essential quality of the theatre - i.e. the close collaboration between spectator and actor - one finds oneself in front of an extremely deep ditch. And I, for one, did not find the bridge necessary to cross it.