Words matter. These are the best Bruno Dumont Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Sound creates an intimate effect: the sensation to feel the place. It makes the viewer enter. You have the liberty to hear what you want.
I’m not Catholic. I don’t believe in God. But at the same time, I’m obsessed by the sacred, by spirituality. The question of redemption has been present well before Christianity, but as French people are a bit stupid, they see all that in religious terms.
I don’t watch my own past films: when I watch them, I find they don’t work very well, because I have changed. If I continue to make films, in fact, it is because I always want to repair my films. My inner rhythm has changed; I have changed. I have changed my way to film.
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.
Personally, I don’t give a toss about French viewers. I make films for foreigners – it’s a bit like Ken Loach, who’s not very popular in England but has had a lot of success in France. Cinema is always an experience in a foreign body.
An actor is an instrument. One needs to control them.
To retain his dignity, an artist must live in opposition. He must be critical of his country. If not, then he is worthless.
You can’t create a movie as you think about it. And what’s in the scene is not what’s being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I’m not going to intervene.
There is no god. I am an atheist. It is up to us to become God. We need to be elevated, to become saints. God alienates people from themselves.
Each role demands the right actor. To play an artist, one must be an artist.
Women exist in my imagination. So they are necessarily a type of abstraction. Many women criticise me for this vision, but I explain to them it’s to be expected, because I am a man.
Matching character and actor is what a good director does.
I think that the cinema is a physical thing. What I’m looking for is creating a physical shock with the audience. I don’t care of the meaning. I don’t care of the idea. I don’t want to say something. I want to make a ‘shock physique.’
Cinema is all about going back from shadow to light and back and forth: cinema is a place of transgression.
Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.
When you make movies, you have to be preoccupied with the social problems, otherwise there is no point in making a movie. To have a story, you need a social problem. Not necessarily a problem, but something to get the idea for a story, otherwise there’s no story.
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.
I think there’s not a lot of real filmmakers. There are only a few people who make real cinema. I can count them on my fingers.
I don’t want actors to know anything. The more they are lost, the better they play.
The actor already comes with emotions to the scene: fear, the fear of being in front of the camera. It is this fear that spurs the emotion of the scene. I too am afraid; I don’t know exactly what I am searching for. On the set, we are all participating in this fear together.
