Your relationship to a film, and to cinema, is very much determined by yourself, so what is relevant is you.

Cinema is made to film material: the body. By filming the material, the mechanical, the worker, we arrive at the spiritual.

Cinema is all about going back from shadow to light and back and forth: cinema is a place of transgression.

For working with non-professional actors, you have to have this particular desire to work with people who are reluctant to play in a movie. I like this relationship. I'm like a recruiter, an employment agency giving someone employment.

Cinema is my religion. It is a way to make people sensitive, through emotions. To make them feel, experience empathy. People are touched and act ethically when they are emotionally touched.

Cinema builds memories; great films continue to exist in the spectator's mind. We are naturally capable of and prone to nostalgia. A spectator will reconstruct a film he or she has seen, years later, and may even change their original opinion. One critic, for example, once gave the finger to one of my films; later he wrote me to apologize.