Quotes from Jean-Pierre Melville

There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle... Perhaps...

There is no solitude greater than the samurai's, unless perhaps it be that of a tiger in the jungle.

I don't know what will be left of me fifty years from now. I suspect that all films will have aged terribly and that the cinema probably won't even exist anymore. My guess is that the final disappearance of cinemas will take place around the year 2020, so in fifty years' time, there will be nothing but television.

I believe you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.

My love for cinema began with the talkies, around 1929 or '30. The first time I heard a word coming from a screen was White Shadows in the South Seas by Van Dyke and Flaherty, when Monte Blue suddenly said, "Civilization, civilization." It was the first time I'd heard talking cinema. At that moment I fell madly in love.

It was difficult, but I managed. When I had money, I'd buy film and we'd shoot. I think your first film should be made with your own blood. [On producing his first full length film, Le Silence de la Mer (1949) himself]

All my films hinge on the fantastic. I'm not a documentarian; a film is first and foremost a dream, and it's absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact recreation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me.

I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.

It's the honest point of view of an artist: You have to please. I'd like viewers to come away from my films unsure whether they've understood them. I want to leave them wondering.

I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.

At birth man is offered only one choice --the choice of his death. But if this choice is governed by distaste for his own existence, his life will never have been more than meaningless.

I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.