Quotes from Celine Sciamma

My work has always been about not being conventional and male gaze is convention.

Wonder Woman' is thinking about me. It's thinking about my pleasure, about my sisters, about the history of cinema and women's representation. It gives us joy but also rage.

When I turned 13 all of my life was designed around earning money to buy cinema tickets.

I like 'Girlhood' because it has this universal feeling, and that's also the project of the film, to bring very contemporaneous characters into the big fiction, and the classical idea of a heroine's emancipation.

With 'Back to the Future', time-traveling lets you go back to a better, more comfortable life where your parents are happy and you have a lot of money - the capitalistic version of time travel.

We're always being told that there's a linear progress regarding women. It only gets better, especially for women artists. It's not true.

Well, regarding actors, my idol is Catherine Deneuve, but not in relation to my work, I'm just a fan. As far as genres, I've been reading a lot of science fiction, and I would love to make a fantastic film.

A kid is always locked down inside their family. In the film, I felt like talking about loss and death, which we've had a lot of right now, but you know, the experience of lockdown maybe gave me more courage to believe we could create cinema while all locked in our houses.

I was kind of a tomboy when I was the age of the character. I could be mistaken for a boy - sometimes I found it cool and sometimes I found it hard, but I remember the excitement.

So I guess with females, it should be acknowledged that we're more hybrid. We can be anything. Maybe we're more free to create.

I grew up in a world where stories and images were made and told by men. So I know this world very well. I am moved by this world.

I don't write a synopsis, I don't write a treatment. I write scene by scene.

When you are bringing a love story to screen, how do you embody desire and love? How do you get away from the conventions of romantic comedy where it's love at first sight?

I wrote the screenplay for 'Water Lilies' while I was studying screenwriting at La Femis film school in Paris, and the director Xavier Beauvois, who was on the graduation committee, told me I had to make the film myself.

Well, I think I'm trying to be in the middle of two traditions, the French tradition, which is about being fair and staying close to reality, and the American tradition which is about making up a stylized universe, made of shapes and colors.

But what I think I like about coming-of-age stories is that there's everything in them. It's a genre that kind of contains everything: you have the chronicle, you can go into naturalism, but it's also about transforming physically, so it's kind of a fantastical genre.

Working with young actors is really going with trust. I never see them act beforehand. Because that's not their job. It's my job to make it happen on set.

I'm always embarrassed when I'm asked about meaning, because it is what you make it. The meaning is yours, so it's not about what I think. It's for us all to reflect and change perspectives.

I consider my first three films a trilogy and I was finished with discussing the topic of teenagehood and coming of age.

My grandmother introduced me to musicals and Fred Astaire and Cary Grant and all the American comedies and classics.

Lady Gaga is not saying anything new, she's just quoting something that's already been said, and staging it. It rarely seems sincere. That's why I always try to say something authentic.

Ninety per cent of what we look at is the male gaze. They don't see themselves anymore.

Normally I'm watching people become actors in the process of making the film. It's very important you have a lot of respect when you are dealing with young people. You are in charge of everything about the process. You're an adult and they're not.

I mean, putting women in the center of a movie and not talking about men, that's already political, right?