Top 15 Bruno Dumont Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

No movie can claim to be a work of philosophy. They fulfill a totally different need in people.

To retain his dignity, an artist must live in opposition. He must be critical of his country. If not, then he is worthless.

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.

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.

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.

An actor is an instrument. One needs to control them.

I feel I have a political duty to reach out to the general public. I want to make films that the people want to see. So if the people want to see Johnny Depp or Tom Cruise, then it is really my job to incorporate them into my films.