Biography
Friends and Family
Alfred Hitchcock
[Friend]
::
Roland Truffaut
[Step Father]
::
Jeanine de Montferrand
[Mother]
::
Roland Lévy
[Father]
Trivia and Quotes
Quotes
 Cinema is an improvement on life. When I first saw Citizen Kane (1941), I was certain that never in my life had I loved a person the way I loved that film.
[on Jean-Pierre Leaud] The most interesting actor of his generation.
"I make films that I would like to have seen when I was a young man."
"Film lovers are sick people."
"I have always preferred the reflect of the life to life itself"
"Is the cinema more important than life ?"
"Some day I`ll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste."
"Taste is a result of a thousand distastes."
Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud are my contemporaries.
One looks at films differently when one is a director or a critic. For example, though I have always loved Citizen Kane (1941), I loved it in different ways at different stages of my career. When I saw it as a critic, I particularly admired the way the story is told: the fact that one is rarely permitted to see the person who interviews all the characters, the fact that chronology is not respected, things like that. As a director I cared more about technique: all the scenes are shot in a single take and do not use reverse cutting; in most scenes you hear the soundtrack before you see the corresponding images - that reflects Orson Welles` radio training, etc. Behaving like the ordinary spectator, one uses a film as if it were a drug; he is dazed by the motion and doesn`t try to analyze. A critic, on the other hand, is forced to write summaries of films in 15 lines. That forces one to apprehend the structure of a film and to rationalize his liking for it.
Originally, I didn`t like [John Ford]--because of his material: for example, the comic secondary characters, the brutality, the male-female relationships typified by the man`s slapping the woman on the backside. But eventually I came to understand that he had achieved an absolute uniformity of technical expertise. And his technique is the more admirable for being unobtrusive: His camera is invisible; his staging is perfect; he maintains a smoothness of surface in which no one scene is allowed to become more important than any other. Such mastery is possible only after one has made an enormous number of films. Questions of quality aside, John Ford is the Georges Simenon of directors.
Sometimes I force myself. In the case of Domicile conjugal (1970) I laid down certain laws for myself. Henri Langlois, who loved Baisers volés (1968), said to me, `Now you have to get Jean-Pierre Léaud and Claude Jade married.`
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