Quotes from Michel Hazanavicius

Sure, I watched a lot of Hollywood movies. Maybe I've seen more Hollywood movies than French movies

I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang, Tod Browning, and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don't care about the genre.

Here in France, what we love is Life. And all the pleasures that go with it.

Even if I make fun of him, I try to portray him as a human being. Sometimes because he's the great Jean-Luc Godard, we see him as a concept.

You - as a director, you have to do your job, you have to show things, and you don't have to ask the actors to do it, or the dialogue.

I think we are at the very beginning of high changes, not only in terms of digital film, but in the way the movies will be screened, whether they'll be screened on phones, on computers - on everything.

I'm very happy in France making movies.

My life is OK. I live in France. It's a very cool country to make films.

In France, it's really different the way you live. It's a non-religious country. The public space is not religious; religion is a private thing.

French cinema audiences usually don't express anything. Certainly not satisfaction.

But I don't think of myself as a foreigner or a Frenchman! I just think of myself as a director.

But I don't think of myself as a foreigner or a Frenchman! I just think of myself as a director. Whether I'm French or Australian or whatever, it's really not important.

When we were making the movie, winning awards for it wasn't the point at all. We didn't even have an American distributor.

The silent movie is an emotional cinema: it's sensory; the fact that you don't go through a text brings you back to a basic way of telling a story predicated on the feelings you have created.

This is the problem with language, and this is what makes silent movies fun, because the connection with them, me or the audience is not with the language. There's no question of interpretation of what we are saying it's just about feeling. You create your own story.

Bernard Herrmann was a genius, a great, great composer.

When you speak of silent movies, everyone thinks of Charlie Chaplin first.

To me the recognition of the audience is part of the filmmaking process. When you make a movie, it's for them.

I think being a foreigner and talking about Hollywood allowed me to use some cliches and some references that an American would maybe not use.

I always loved silent movies. I was not a specialist, but I loved them. And when I started directing, I became really fascinated by the format - how it works, the device of the silent movie. It's not the same form of expression as a talkie. The lack of sounds makes you participate in the storytelling.

I've always been against the idea of dividing films between festival titles and popular movies. I think you can make films that are both.

Some people probably think me telling Godard's story is blasphemy. My friends were worried. But he's not my hero or my god. Godard is like the leader of a sect, and I'm an agnostic.

I don't make films to reproduce reality.

Sometimes when an actor says something almost perfect, but you know you have to edit it, if you tell them to change something immediately, it will come out great.