- To be selected at Cannes is a privilege and it must remain so. But the world is changing and Cannes must ask all the questions that will be asked at the biggest festival in the world. The great museums show the great painters. Cannes shows the great filmmakers. Today, everything is more difficult, less relaxed, with more limited financial and economic issues. Gone is the time when Fellini and Mastroianni were walking freely on the Croisette. [2014]
- I was very fortunate to have Guillermo's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) in competition at Cannes [in 2006]. For me, it was very important to have not only a very good film but a genre movie. It was a way of allowing genre cinema into Cannes competition where it was very difficult to have cinema like this. (...) Like other genre directors Guillermo del Toro is great in mise-en-scène [composition, design, sets, actors' movements] and a poet of monstrosity, a son of the 1920s, 1930s, of F.W. Murnau, of a very important tradition in cinema. [2015]
- [on the lack of female directors at Cannes] We have 20% (women filmmakers). In world cinema, only 7% are women according to a study conducted by UNESCO - and we have 20%. [2016]
- There's something organic in a selection of 50 films that reflect the entirety of cinema: The young, the old, men, women, Westerners, Asians, Latinos, radical forms and classic ones. All of that constitutes a package in which you can find everything. I think it's important that Cannes continues to be a platform where we show personal auteurs who have their own touch, who experiment and play with the form of cinema, but it's also important to show that classic forms matter as well. [2016]
- [if he would include a TV selection at Cannes] We've shown TV before: Olivier Assayas' Carlos (2010). But we'll always favor [theatrical] films. When Steven Soderbergh and Olivier Assayas, who are auteurs, work on TV formats, we're obviously interested but beyond that we're not going to create a dedicated TV section. [2016]
- [on the emergence of new players like Amazon] Amazon bought five films playing in official selection, and that's great. If Amazon can become a new financing force for independent cinema, that's good news. But it remains important to release films theatrically. Amazon does it, Netflix does it a bit, as with Beasts of No Nation (2015). Netflix needs to take out its logo from movies though because people might think, "Oh it's a Netflix movie, I can just see it at home." [2016]
- France is unique in the sense that pretty much every film comes out in theaters. The Institute Lumiere just bought three theaters with 10 screens, and it's working tremendously. People just love going to see movies. [2016]
- [the most exciting local film industries today] There's [South] Korea, Mexico, Romania, Israel, Lebanon and Argentina. Also Brazil;...[2016]
- [on diversity of filmmakers in terms of color] That's the new trend! The color. And after that what will it be? The height, the hair? Jeff Nichols made a movie about an interracial marriage. I don't care if Jeff Nichols is white or black. [2016]
- I'm from the school of generosity. I don't need to exist while hating. I want to exist while loving. I'm not naive but I don't see what's the problem in loving classic and modern cinema. [2016]
- [on Jim Jarmusch presenting a feature film and a documentary] Like a writer, he can do both a novel and sometimes reportage in the press. It's the same expression and is part of the territory of creation. It's good to have documentaries, because sometimes things can only be expressed by reality. I think we have to open windows. We have to show what a filmmaker can be. [2016]
- To have more women in Cannes, we have to have more women in cinema. Cannes is not the problem, do not blame Cannes. Cannes is the consequence. [2016]
- [on the Cannes selection process] I have my share of work, which is also about seeing lousy films. And there are a lot of them. Off of the 1,800 [submitted] films, not all of them are great. We have three selection committees: a foreign committee, a French one and third one for other films. I'm still receiving notes on movies. There are films we haven't seen. We keep watching. (...) When we're interested we talk with the filmmakers. Ken Loach, I knew he was shooting a film so we send text messages, make phone calls to check in. But then we have to see the actual film. A lot of people are quick to point who is missing from the selection. But most often, we just decided that it wasn't good enough - and we're rarely wrong. Every year, if you look at the Césars and the Oscars, there are a lot of movies from Cannes. Sometimes we miss things...[2016]
- Cinema is developing everywhere across the globe: New cineastes, new countries, new forms. Le Certain Regard is here to welcome all of it. [2016]
- I prefer a good commercial movie over a bad auteur movie.
- Cannes is a laboratory. We have to try things, open the windows, and try to do something different. We have to open our eyes to everywhere in the world... [2014]
- We live in a civilization right now where images are everywhere - on your telephone screen, on YouTube and all over the rest of the internet. And yet the movies in this year's competition, such as the Egyptian, Lebanese or Chinese films - or Eva Husson's film Girls of the Sun (2018), about Kurdish female soldiers - reveal how the cinema continues to tell us about our own world in an extremely singular way. When Louis Lumière sent his camera operators across the planet over 100 years ago, it was to bring back images of the rest of the world. And the cinema continues to do this, perhaps more so this year than before - which is why the competition seems so diverse, and also why we've officially decided to ban selfies. You need to respect real images. [2018]
- We're now in 2018 and the film industry has changed with regards to what I call 'cinematographic creation.' Netflix is behind that change, but they're also a company that loves cinema - just like we do at Cannes. But they have a business model, which is the internet, while our model, whether it's right or wrong, is a festival where films are screened in theaters and then released in theaters in France. [2018]
- [on the new press screening rules in Cannes] In his preface to the biography of the critic André Bazin, François Truffaut wrote that we need to remember how back during Bazin's time, critics would always see movies with the public in regular movie theaters. And then they would write their reviews, which would come out on Friday for a movie that was released in France on a Wednesday. Today, everyone needs to see films early, either in press screenings, on DVD or on links, and journalists no longer have the experience of watching films in the theater like regular people. So, I actually think that having critics in Cannes see films with the public will allow them to reflect differently, or to take more time to write something more than a tweet. [2018]
- [why Netflix decided not to screen films at Cannes in 2018] Because the 'chronology of media' laws in France say that a film can only play on a VOD platform like Netflix 36 months after its theatrical release. So maybe the chronology needs to evolve. In a way, the existence of Netflix forces us to question existing practices, to rethink them. [2018]
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