Quotes from Denis Villeneuve

From 'Polytechnique,' I started to get scripts and after 'Incendies,' of course, it exploded.

Since I began making movies, I've always looked for screenwriters instead of going through the long and painful process of writing.

I think I'm attracted to subjects that I'm afraid of. It's a way to approach things I am afraid of, things that bring fear in my heart, and try to understand them, try to deal with them. It's like demons. I try to approach it and understand it... I'm just visiting fears.

Each movie I make has its own heroes, and the two heroes for me in 'Arrival' are Amy Adams and Joe Walker, the editor. We worked very, very hard, and it was, by far, the longest editing process.

I started in documentaries. I started alone with a camera. Alone. Totally alone. Shooting, editing short documentaries for a French-Canadian part of CBC. So to deal with the camera alone, to approach reality alone, meant so much. I made a few dozen small documentaries, and that was the birth of a way to approach reality with a camera.

I've been dreaming to do sci-fi since I was 10 years old, and I said 'no' to a lot of sequels - I couldn't say 'no' to 'Blade Runner.'

When I think of the 1980s, the only color that comes to mind is a brown, yellowish color. I guess it's coming from my life experience, and it's melancholia and sadness and a bit of joy.

I made 'Enemy' to prep myself for 'Prisoners.' I had the need to direct something smaller in English before going to Hollywood. That's the way I sold it to Warner because they asked me if I was berserk to make a movie right before.

When you do casting in Hollywood, it's always the same question: 'Who is available?'

I feel, since 2001, this huge need for Americans to have superheroes on the screen. This idea that a super-being will protect you. That this being can go above the law but, at the end of the day, would be a good force and defeat the evil. This idea that this half-god exists. This need in the subconscious of America to find these gods.

I must say, to my great surprise and pleasure, I deeply loved making movies in the United States because of all the opportunities it gave me to work with people that I admire as artists.

I think a good director is a good listener.

Making poetry with a camera - that's the essence of what I do.

If I wanted to have total control and be a dictator, I would do ice sculpture in my basement. If I want to make a movie, I'm going to work with 500 people, and I will have to work with their strength and their weakness.

Film is pop art. It's not whether it's auteur cinema or not; that's a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.

'Arrival' talks very little about language and how to precisely dissect a foreign language. It's more a film on intuition and communication by intuition, the language of intuition.

Sometimes you have compulsions that you can't control coming from the subconscious... They are the dictator inside ourselves.

There's a sense in American cinema: you want to portray an ideal world. You want to portray a Utopia. That's good- dreams for a better world, to advocate for something better, yes. But if you look at my movies, they are exploring today's shadows.

I'm not someone that loves dialogue - I am someone that loves movement. Action, if it's well done, can be very poetic and meaningful.

I think they built Hollywood on the West Coast because they were always dreaming of a New World. When they arrived here, the only way to keep dreaming was to make movies. Film was the fourth dimension.

The problem in cinema is that you can never predict what will happen.

I've always been in love with language. My favorite book is a dictionary. I have always loved words.

I'm someone who thinks that the world would be a better place if there was a big middle class. I mean, middle class is peace. In a perfect world, everybody would have enough to eat and we'd be living in security. It's obvious. I'm very happy to pay my taxes and all that. I would say I'm more of a Social Democrat.

'Sicario' is about how the Western world reacts toward problems outside of its borders. Should we become monsters in order to fight the monsters? It's not about the cartels. The movie could have been set in Africa or the Middle East.