- What's missing nowadays is major ambition in work. I don't mean ambition to be famous. I mean ambition to do something that can't be done or that no one sane would do. [2010]
- [on the troubled production of American Widow (2009)] Well, it's been going on for some time, even if it's been kind of in a static stage right now. You know that the producer of Process (2004) - Humbert Balsan - committed suicide? (...) This was probably the most meaningful event of my adult life. We were supposed to be working together on that film on the Paris sequences and on other films, I was about to start shooting in one month, and he committed suicide. So I had the people, the crew, not much money, but I decided to continue anyway. I'm convinced I had post traumatic stress disorder for the whole first shoot. Luckily I had several great experiences doing that, for example shooting with Yekaterina Golubeva and Cat Power, but I never had enough money to complete the film as I would have liked to, and I'm not willing to make a big mess just to finish it and do it badly, so I've been showing little pieces of it in different places, but I've been never able to finish the film. It's not far from being finished but I haven't been able to find the money. It's been an evolving experience, meaning the actual story has changed because it's been going on for so long... How I initially planned it was to tell a story about loss and 9/11 from the point of view of seven women. That part hasn't really changed, I've shot scenes with men that I won't use them. So, after doing the initial shoots, after a year, a year and a half it just became very difficult to maintain it, so it remains unfinished. But the sequences I shot are there, they remain, I've preserved them, they look great, and I've been keeping everything safe, and adding some new things now and then. But it's not something I've been thinking about showing a lot at the moment. I'm not sure I understand what the audience means to me anymore. It's become abstract. [2014]
- Yes, I've had unpaid debts in the past. It's occasionally, I'd even say often, a problem. (...) I guess it's a problem with ambitious projects and not having enough of a budget to do them. But I wouldn't agree that's been true of every project I've ever worked on, it's just been true of a lot of them. [Interview with Christian Storm, Vice, Dec. 2013]
- I have often said that I make films in a curatorial way. By that I mean I put together a series of elements which all together tell a story which is not the same as the film narrative so to speak.
- I met a pair of novice Dutch producers who offered to produce my first feature, Sentimental Education (1998), based on Gustave Flaubert's novel and set in the contemporary world of modelling with the focus on a male model having a crisis of faith. The cast was pretty amazing including Arsinée Khanjian, Guillaume Canet, Julie Gayet, Thom Hoffman, Isabelle Carré, and Sylvie Testud. The producers did everything they could to give me what I wanted. Ultimately we fell out and they tried to edit the film without me. I couldn't let that happen and consequently the film has never been released.
- In Cannes in 1998 I met Peter Aalbæk Jensen who runs Zentropa with Lars von Trier. Peter was generous with me. He invited me to make a film at Zentropa. It was a strange time. I had never experienced homophobia before, and at Zentropa I did. It probably didn't help things that I used to say Zentropa has 100 employees: Lars von Trier and 99 people to laugh at his jokes. Peter gave me the use of the studios and all the equipment I needed for free. I started Far from China (2001) in Denmark and ultimately I left and completed the film in Paris and London. The film had its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in 2001 in London. Recently a curator from Centre Pompidou asked for a print. It was a baptism by fire up there. Let's just say I wasn't drinking the Kool-Aid and it didn't go down very well. I still feel a lot of warmth for Peter. I like the film a lot. I think Marianne Faithfull, Steven Mackintosh and Antoine Chappey give outstanding performances and the score by Suede is great. (...) One of the reasons the film is hard to see is that the producers never collected the print after the first screening. I have met people who have bought black market DVDs in Asia and I get requests for the film often.
- The physical act of shooting a film is very unpleasant. The director is a hostage of the crew for the length of the shoot, most of whom could be working at Walmart for all they care. This is even true in France, which offers the best shooting conditions for a director in my experience. The best part is that occasionally magic happens. You fight your way past the bureaucracy of the set and all of the gossip and small talk and something brilliant emerges in spite of the situation. The other great part is that eventually the shoot ends, and the film lives on forever. The difficulty of the shoot is what keeps me from making more films.
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