Quotes About Godard

Whether you're Godard or Almodovar or Scorsese, it's text, text, text. Everything begins with the text, and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms.

Jean-Luc Godard saw me in a commercial. He first asked me to play a little part in 'Breathless' of a girl who is taking her clothes off. I said, 'No, I don't want to take my clothes off.' But he called me again for 'Le Petit Soldat.' He said it was a political film, so I didn't have to take my clothes off at all.

I love beautiful black-and-white movies - anything Bette Davis, especially 'Now', 'Voyager', 'Casablanca', 'Mildred Pierce'; anything by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or Godard; and 'Paper Moon' by Peter Bogdanovich.

To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionized their forms.

Self-portraits have been done in painting, but never in music or literature. It has no meaning, it makes no sense. And in movies I was wondering if it could. And how.

I grew up cinematically in the '70s. I was watching a lot of Godard, Bresson, Dreyer, and all sorts of old films and the Czech New Wave.

For me, the French new wave is Truffaut and Rohmer. Godard I sometimes have trouble with because he's very much of a director's director. I feel Truffaut is such a humanist, and I always go in that direction.

i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.

Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho.

Art and theory of art, at one and the same time ; beauty and the secret of beauty ; cinema, and apologia for cinema. ' - Godard on Godard: Critical Writings

Suddenly I had a call one day saying they'd like me to come to the office to see Jean-Luc Godard. 'He is preparing a film called 'Breathless.' Jean would like to see you.' I said yes. I thought he was pretty strange, because at that time nobody was wearing those kind of glasses where you couldn't see the eyes.

It was always the same thing - no script, dialogue at the last minute. Everyone always thought we just said anything we wanted. It's difficult to explain - some actors want to know why they have to do this and that. It was so simple and natural with Godard.

I think it was [Jean-Luc] Godard who said that life is nothing but a bad copy of film, but then our ambition must be to make better films and better shapes of forms that are given in life.

Godard is a phony to me. His technique is great, but he just keeps replaying the same political rhetoric.

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 would never see a good movie for the first time on television.

A lot of films made me love the movies, everything from Hitchcock to Godard. But the ones that really grabbed me were Costa-Gavras's films like 'Z' and 'State of Siege.'

So I called and said, 'Mommy, I'm doing a political film with Jean-Luc Godard. You have to come and sign the contract.' She thought I was lying, so she hung up the phone. But then she came the next day, even though she had never taken an airplane in her life. She came to Paris and she signed my contract.

Anne Wiazemsky wrote two books about her life with Jean-Luc Godard between 1966 and 1969. And I first read the second one, which is about the fall of their love story and their marriage. I immediately thought there was a movie to make with this book because it was so funny, and I thought the love story was very, very touching.

Truth is in all things, even partly, in error.

Jean-Luc Godard said that cinema is the truth 24 frames a second. I think cinema is lies 24 frames a second.

After a while, Godard was going to do 'A Woman is a Woman' with Sami Frey and another actress in the leading lady part but they couldn't do it and so he had to find somebody else. I was not supposed to play the lead in it in the beginning - I originally had one of the smaller parts.

My father loved 'Godard and Truffaut.' He was more artsy. My mom loved the 'Bourne' trilogy; she likes big blockbusters. She loved that I did 'I Am Legend.' My passion for acting came with my passion for movies.

Gleaning is performed, not administered, Scythe Goddard told him. It is a willful action. To slip into passivity and allow poison to do all the work is an embarrassment to who and what we are.