Volker Schlöndorff

“L'Eclisse, the, the very first, next to my first movie. L'Eclisse is the one I wanted to have, that's what I came for. And, and as it is sitting next to Young Törless, it makes it even nicer. Isn't it an honor? Michelangelo, he took me to a palazzo once in Venice to watch the parade of the boats. Well, you see, L'Eclisse is really the one what I, why I came for. And isn't it magical that you come in, there hundred, hundreds of them, and the first one I see where I stop is the Eclipse? I might just as well leave right now. But I'm very, very happy with L'Eclisse and All That Jazz.”

“Well, I'd like to have All That Jazz because when we were shooting Circle of Deceit in Beirut, once a week we got dailies sent from the lab in Paris, and we went to a still-working local cinema in the mid of the civil war. And all the time they were playing All That Jazz. I get that the only print they still had in war-torn Beirut, and we always had to sit through the last 15 minutes of the movie before we could screen in our dailies. And it became like our leitmotif during the shoot: "Bye-bye happiness, I think I'm going to die," which was exactly how we felt like often.”

“I'm proud because I see a few of my own. The Coup de Grâce, again with Margarethe von Trotta, then married to me.”

“I've been flooded with good movies. I mean, I have to start with Boyhood because it was somehow so unexpected and was so wonderful. It was already six weeks ago. A miracle of a movie. How could he in the casting, especially with the boy, have the intuition that 10 years or 14 years later this boy would still be wonderful? And same with Arquette and everybody else. Hawke's is just fabulous. To see people really age on screen, no fake makeup, and still remain in their character. A miracle, a miracle of a movie.”

“By Claude Chabrol. I remember the very first screening of this in the Grand Auditorium of the Sorbonne. It was the first film of the Nouvelle Vague that kind of, you know, with, screen was so different from everything else. Actually, I at the time working with Jean-Pierre Melville, I thought it was a bit amateurish, and I didn't quite understand how great it was just because of that. Wonderful. And the pharmacy in the province, in the French province.”

“Like Le Havre, another great one about the French province. Actually, maybe the French movies set not in Paris, maybe even better than the ones set in Paris, more authentic. Certainly true of French novels like Stendhal and Flaubert.”

“I'm glad you have Ace in the Hole, Billy Wilder's film maudit. They tried all kind of titles. I thought the last release was called The Big Carnival.”