The Films in My Life

A lovely time of life—when one cares more about the fate of those we admire than about one’s own.

first step involved seeing lots of movies; secondly, I began to note the name of the director as I left the theater. In the third stage I saw the same films over and over and began making choices as to what I would have done, if I had been the director. At that period of my life, movies acted on me like a drug

I believe a work is good to the degree that it expresses the man who created it.

No question that there are soft spots in Fellini’s film, but however little one may love cinema, there’s more pleasure and profit to be had in that extra “half-hour” than in the whole of the two English films that were shown

André Bazin, began to publish his sharply critical movie reviews in Cahiers du Cinéma and Arts.

When I was a critic, I thought that a successful film had simultaneously to express an idea of the world and an idea of cinema

I always agreed with Audiberti: “The most obscure poem is addressed to everybody.”

The same year, under Kurosawa’s influence, Ingmar Bergman shot exactly the same theme (The Virgin Spring) but he set it in fourteenth-century Sweden.

Buñuel and Bergman

People of the world are so imbued with their own stupidity that they can never believe that one of their own has talent. They appreciate only people of letters who are not of their world.” So Marcel Proust wrote to Mme. Straus.