Jacques Audiard Quotes

If I ask my actors to bare themselves, to reveal themselves as almost naked, I have to bare myself, expose myself as well. That's what creates excitement.

What interests me about genre is that the public connects immediately with it, it has certain rules, certain codes the audience recognizes. I can use that to create something very big.

It's truly gratifying to see my films reach beyond a familiar public, to get a chance to move new audiences. It's nuts. It's extraordinary.

I don't feel comfortable with violence, and I'm not sure that I film violent scenes properly, and it's something I'm reticent to do, and yet violence is sort of in all of my films.

Beauty is subjective: Bette Davis wasn't beautiful, but she was more than beautiful.

For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.

Do we root for Michael Corleone in the 'Godfather' films? I think so, even if he is a monster.

An archetypal gangster is always at a remove. We can't get into his mindset.

Cool? Am I cool? I don't know, but I hope my characters are cool, in the sense of iconic. That's my job, at its very essence.

The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.

I don't like spontaneity; there you go. I'm wary of it.

When someone is punched in the face, you find out what they are made of.

The so-called "remake" is simply a commercial formulation of a much deeper exchange which accounts for the way cinema is what it is.

I think that cinema has always progressed through exchanges.

The most heroic thing you can do is tell someone that you love them.

When you're a kid and your father is an engineer, he goes to the office. I saw my father get up and go to the office in the house and write. But I don't see any similarities.

I was the little French boy who grew up hearing people talk of De Gaulle and the Resistance. France against the Nazis! Then when that boy grew up, he began to uncover things. We began to legitimately ask the question, 'What exactly did our parents do during the Occupation?' We discovered it was not the story they were telling us.

Cinema for me only has meaning when it has a relationship with what I see outside on the street.

If you look at American studios, the big productions have nothing to do with reality.

I really believe the form of the film must be in the scenario; cinema is not just added value to the scripting. I believe in it as a totality.