The battle between two men over a girl is the same as the fight for two men over a piece of land. It is all about desire. There is no difference between a love triangle and the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Bruno Dumont
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.
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.
Matching character and actor is what a good director does.
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'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.
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.
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.
Cinema is made to film material: the body. By filming the material, the mechanical, the worker, we arrive at the spiritual.
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.
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.
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.
Cinema is all about going back from shadow to light and back and forth: cinema is a place of transgression.
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.
The people follow what the media say. So if you said that Bruno Dumont is fantastic, it follows that more people would go to see my films. I have no wish to remain on the sidelines. I have no wish to make films that are only seen by bohemians in London and Paris.
I don't want actors to know anything. The more they are lost, the better they play.
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.
Your relationship to a film, and to cinema, is very much determined by yourself, so what is relevant is you.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
