Jean-Luc Godard (French: [ʒɑ̃lyk ɡɔdaʁ]; born 3 December 1930) is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement.
Through most of my career I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.
What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal. . . and then die.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.
Truth is in all things, even partly, in error.
In movies, comedy and tragedy are all the same.
the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera; the movie is the reality of the movie moving from reality to the camera.
I would never see a good movie for the first time on television.
Give me more. Let's do what has not been done.
This new world which is being born is cynical and amnesiac. And it has eliminated perspective.
In the beginning there was not even talking. In movies, there was no need for that. Because it was more evident if there was no talking. Only in sports does there remain this fervor, which can even become violent. There's this desire to see something big.
When you photograph a face. . . you photograph the soul behind it.
Now at my age I understand how sad it must have been for some directors or actors at the time the talkies began. Because, really, a whole continent disappeared.
To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
Living, it can be sad too.
There are no more simple images. . . The world is too much for an image. You need several of them, a chain of images.
Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.
I learned from Rossellini that you are rich even if you have a little money.
Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.