Catherine Breillat

“[Translated] The first film I saw in my life was Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel. And the second film I saw was Viridiana. I was twelve years old and oddly enough, as much as I saw Harriet Andersson as my fictional body... The actress in Viridiana was not my fictional body, but I must have had an even stronger connection to her because in all my memories of the film, it's always my face that I see. It's still very strange. It's absolutely wonderful.”

“[Translated] David Lynch is someone else I love, and his power over images, here as a very young man. This is his first film, and we see it clearly. He's inspired by the poetry of silent film, with its phantasmagorical lighting. And I draw a lot of inspiration from that too. I think Eraserhead totally inspired one of the shots in Anatomy of Hell.”

“[Translated] So, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront... The film which allowed me to make cinema again, at a time when I was a pariah in France, its worst director, the shame of the nation... I went into a movie theater, and at the time they played films on a loop. So I went in at noon, and stayed until midnight watching Baby Doll on repeat. And the next day I wrote 36 Fillette. That's the way it is. I find that great geniuses, great works, reach out to you and help you to live, to become an author, to become yourself, really.”

“[Translated] I'm not familiar with Vengeance Is Mine. But Imamura is an immense master. This Japanese approach, which is not at all popular in France, where films are still very psychological, and things must follow a logic, a flow of facts, of characters and their evolutions. What I love about the Japanese is that things creep up suddenly, and it's so much better. So much more life-like. I think it's absolutely sublime.”

“[Translated] So this is my childhood. And we always want to revisit our childhoods, especially their myths. I know I loved this movie, and it's funny because we need to revisit the things we saw in our childhood, it's like rereading the books you love. I think it's better to watch a masterpiece 100 times than to watch a film once that distracts you, but has no use. But "distracting" in French has two meanings. It also means to take away. It takes away one and a half, two hours of boredom. But an essential film transports you to another dimension, where we feel so good.”

“[Translated] Andrei Rublev is obviously Tarkovsky's masterpiece. And Tarkovsky... I met him, I even cooked for him at my house, if you can imagine! He was so modest, and he said that to torture him, they had cut off his phone. The entire negative of a film he'd made was supposedly damaged in the laboratory. That is totalitarianism. It's not necessarily about eradicating you, but about slowly consuming you. And he was so, so beautiful. He told it so simply. He was so deprived of freedom, sometimes of access to his work and everything else. And it's true that he was extremely moving and simple.”

“[Translated] And, well, there you go. I have the complete Bergman in my hands, as I completely owe him my entire career, because without him, I would've never become a filmmaker.”