For some reason, I have always been interested in the stories of people who are exiled and who are deprived of rights. My main motive to make a film is to keep the society in mind and the hospitality adhered.

I am not at all interested in theories about cinema. I am only interested in images and people and sound. I am really a very simple person.

I'm not rich.

Marguerite Duras was a very good friend of mine and an intellectual hero. She was also a sort of mother figure. Of course she was an influence.

I always thought of Djibouti as a place where human history hasn't really begun yet - or perhaps it's already over. There's something in the landscape that's stronger than human civilisation. There's no agriculture, for example, and there are live volcanoes.

I always thought Vincent Lindon had a sexy body, a body you can trust, a solid body you can lean on.

I don't know - music in film, for me, is not another part of a soundtrack; it is something that also helps to approach a character, to foresee the type of image - you see what I mean - it's like a part of the process.

Making pizza is a great job. All that kneading the dough - everything to do with cooking is wonderful, sensual.

I'm not witty.

When you have countries that have a lot of minerals and diamonds and oil and are in business with companies from all over the world - but these companies don't share, really, their profits - this is called post-post-colonial.

When making a film, if I feel nothing in my body, I can't work. I have to touch. I have to feel. I never stop touching.

Africa is no more this poor continent. It's on the march.

You can spend your whole life in France without ever thinking about the Legion.

What I like is the idea of a group, even if it's just two people - the idea of solitude within a group.

I have very strong relationships with my actors when I'm shooting. When you love an actor's work, you always feel you have to go further, and you make several films together. One film just gives you time to get acquainted.

In Kurosawa's films, the tragedy is that this strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end.

I'm a very sinister person.

The camera is not your eye, and it's not the eye of the audience. I don't think it's my eye, either. It belongs to the film.

I hate the victimization of women, always.

I think you cannot make films without choosing everything.

Shoes have a meaning.

I'm not a tacky person, I think.

Life is not better and more moral than it was in the '50s. It's just the same.

I've never seen a world where only men were responsible for the violence, and the women were innocent. They go together. Men and women are a violent mixture.

I listen to a lot of different kinds of music.

When I was doing 'Beau Travail,' I listened a lot to Benjamin Britten.

I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.

My films are always looked at strangely, and there is nothing I can do about it.

I long to make films. I'm dying to be inside the next film. I always hope there will be another film.

I've heard it said many times, 'Let's work on the look of the film,' but that doesn't work with me.

You don't grow up naive in Africa.

I'm tiny. I'm small.

I was never very interested in my own experience, I think, in fact, if my films have a common link, maybe it's being a foreigner - it's common for people who are born abroad - they don't know so well where they belong.

I didn't foresee my career. Things happen.

I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature - my brain is.

My grandfather died when I was 12, but I remember the sorrow of my mother. Even now, she's an old lady, but when she speaks about her father, she looks young. A love like that is undefeated, you know?

What I don't like so much is to give explanations about people's behaviour... I'm not interested in making conclusions. I would never think about myself or anyone else, 'Well, this happened, this happened, this happened, so this must be the result.' It doesn't work like that with me.

Because TV is mostly close up, it has to be fast. And because it has to be fast, you don't have time to explain completely, by a sequence shot, what's happening between people. So instead of experiencing what's happening, say, when a couple is dancing, dialogue is used to explain.

We don't all look alike - some people think they're tough, some people think they're fragile - but in the end, we share a lot.

The cinema should be human and be part of people's lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me.

I suppose I am interested in the variety of human life - how people live. I am most interested in individuals and how they respond to challenges or to difficulties or just to each other. I am curious about people.

Inside the family, you can go from hate to passivity to extreme love within the same hour.

When I was a child I had a nightmare, and in the morning, I asked my mother and father, 'If I kill someone, would you still love me?' My parents were very preoccupied with this, but I think I'm not the only one to ask for that - not love, but absolute fidelity.

I reproach so many things about my family, but on the other hand, I kept asking them to be my family.

I don't remember being afraid of anything in making films.

I really started watching films when I was 14. As I became a teenager, there was nothing that really interested me apart from music, books and films.

There seem to be more women producers than men.

'Chocolat' was a sort of statement of my own childhood, recognizing I experienced something from the end of the colonial era and the beginning of independence as I was a child that really made me aware of things I never forgot - a sort of childhood that made me different when I was a student in France.

I am always asked, 'You grew up in Africa?' Every time I introduce a film, or I'm interviewed, 'You grew up in Africa?'

I am the eldest child; it's lonely at the top.