Claire Denis Quotes

“Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.”

— Claire Denis

“I am not at all interested in theories about cinema. I am only interested in images and people and sound. I am really a very simple person.”

— Claire Denis

Making pizza is a great job. All that kneading the dough - everything to do with cooking is wonderful, sensual.

— Claire Denis

“My mother's father was from Brazil - a painter, and not a famous one - and was always broke. But he was a free spirit, a great grandfather.”

— Claire Denis

“Africa is no more this poor continent. It's on the march.”

— Claire Denis

“The only thing I find interesting is self-interest.”

— Claire Denis

“A career for me is something like building a bridge. You know, where to put the lifts. You have a plan. I have a blueprint for each film, but not for my life.”

— Claire Denis

“When you have countries that have a lot of minerals and diamonds and oil and are in business with companies from all over the world - but these companies don't share, really, their profits - this is called post-post-colonial.”

— Claire Denis

“I am the eldest child; it's lonely at the top.”

— Claire Denis

“I can't imagine a society with absolutely no solidarity. For me, it's a nightmare. And I don't want to live in a place like that.”

— Claire Denis

I don't remember being afraid of anything in making films.

— Claire Denis

“I don't want to be mysterious.”

— Claire Denis

“I hate the idea of growing accustomed to someone and being faithful.”

— Claire Denis

I hate the victimization of women, always.

— Claire Denis

“I have no relationship to the French bourgeoisie. I don't like connecting with them.”

— Claire Denis

“I listen to a lot of different kinds of music.”

— Claire Denis

I long to make films. I'm dying to be inside the next film. I always hope there will be another film.

— Claire Denis

“I really started watching films when I was 14. As I became a teenager, there was nothing that really interested me apart from music, books and films.”

— Claire Denis

I reproach so many things about my family, but on the other hand, I kept asking them to be my family.

— Claire Denis

“I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature - my brain is.”

— Claire Denis

I think working as an assistant was a part of knowing people who like cinema, and to learn from a movie, you have to watch it.

— Claire Denis

“I think you cannot make films without choosing everything.”

— Claire Denis

I'm not a tacky person, I think.

— Claire Denis

“I'm not a very brave person.”

— Claire Denis

“I'm tiny. I'm small.”

— Claire Denis

“I've experienced love and ambition and desire in my life, but never in the same way as in a family.”

— Claire Denis

In a way, I feel obliged to respect Jean Rouch because I am told he is very important.

— Claire Denis

“Inside the family, you can go from hate to passivity to extreme love within the same hour.”

— Claire Denis

“It's not that I don't like words. There's sometimes no need for words.”

— Claire Denis

“Shoes have a meaning.”

— Claire Denis

“Sometimes bleak is good. Sometimes bleak is necessary. Some part of life is always bleak.”

— Claire Denis

“Sometimes I feel like John Wayne.”

— Claire Denis

The history of colonisation cannot disappear.

— Claire Denis

“There seem to be more women producers than men.”

— Claire Denis

“When I was doing 'Beau Travail,' I listened a lot to Benjamin Britten.”

— Claire Denis

“When making a film, if I feel nothing in my body, I can't work. I have to touch. I have to feel. I never stop touching.”

— Claire Denis

“A father who sees his daughter leave in the arms of another man does not feel the same as a mother. It is heartrending for her, too. But it is not the same.”

— Claire Denis

“'Chocolat' was a sort of statement of my own childhood, recognizing I experienced something from the end of the colonial era and the beginning of independence as I was a child that really made me aware of things I never forgot - a sort of childhood that made me different when I was a student in France.”

— Claire Denis

“Filmmaking creates a sort of - trust, maybe. It has led me to a group of people I feel good with. We have something in common because of film, when otherwise we might have nothing.”

— Claire Denis

For some reason, I have always been interested in the stories of people who are exiled and who are deprived of rights. My main motive to make a film is to keep the society in mind and the hospitality adhered.

— Claire Denis

I always thought of Djibouti as a place where human history hasn't really begun yet - or perhaps it's already over. There's something in the landscape that's stronger than human civilisation. There's no agriculture, for example, and there are live volcanoes.

— Claire Denis

“I can be unkind to someone in the street or in the subway - I'm a bad-tempered person - but I'm unable to be unkind to a character. They exist because of me, and I have responsibility for them.”

— Claire Denis

“I don't know - music in film, for me, is not another part of a soundtrack; it is something that also helps to approach a character, to foresee the type of image - you see what I mean - it's like a part of the process.”

— Claire Denis

I don't think I see the way bodies move in any special way. People say I do, but everybody moves. I don't see why all of a sudden I'm a specialist in the way bodies move.

— Claire Denis

I suppose I am interested in the variety of human life - how people live. I am most interested in individuals and how they respond to challenges or to difficulties or just to each other. I am curious about people.

— Claire Denis

“My grandfather died when I was 12, but I remember the sorrow of my mother. Even now, she's an old lady, but when she speaks about her father, she looks young. A love like that is undefeated, you know?”

— Claire Denis

The cinema should be human and be part of people's lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me.

— Claire Denis

What I don't like so much is to give explanations about people's behaviour ... I'm not interested in making conclusions. I would never think about myself or anyone else, 'Well, this happened, this happened, this happened, so this must be the result.' It doesn't work like that with me.

— Claire Denis

“I'm an anxious person. What I like best is to smoke cigarettes and listen to music. A perfect day for me is a day with coffee, cigarettes, and music, to quote Jim Jarmusch.”

— Claire Denis

“Freedom is not having a big budget.”

— Claire Denis