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.
The trouble with Hollywood is that it has poisoned us. If you see a poster of a movie it is mainly the picture of a woman and a man. Always a love story. Yes. But it shouldn't be that way. It should be another (way).
To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.
Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.
When you photograph a face. . . you photograph the soul behind it.
We are in the twentieth or the twenty-first century, but all the thinking, if you speak to one of those people keen on technology - you see that all their thinking is two centuries old. In cinema, you can show this.
This new world which is being born is cynical and amnesiac. And it has eliminated perspective.
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
What I like in pictures whether by an old director or a young director is when I have the feeling he or she is really using the capacity of film.
One must confront vague ideas with clear images.
When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.
Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.
Cinema is movement, after all.
The observer and the universe are part of the same universe. It's what science discovered at the beginning of this century, when they say you can't tell where an atomic particle is. You know where they are, but not their speed; or you know their speed but not their place, because it depends on you. The one who describes is part of the description.
There is no such thing as intellectual property.
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.
Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)
You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.
We once believed we were auteurs but we weren't. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It's sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.
We are all older and more tired.
I don't know if I am free because I am happy or happy because I am free.