Sometimes bleak is good. Sometimes bleak is necessary. Some part of life is always bleak.

I think working as an assistant was a part of knowing people who like cinema, and to learn from a movie, you have to watch it.

In a way, I feel obliged to respect Jean Rouch because I am told he is very important.

A film takes a lot of time, and yet not enough to share with the people you're making the movie with, I think.

I don't want to be mysterious.

'White Material' is about courage and craziness.

I can be unkind to someone in the street or in the subway - I'm a bad-tempered person - but I'm unable to be unkind to a character. They exist because of me, and I have responsibility for them.

Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.

The history of colonisation cannot disappear.

Sometimes I feel like John Wayne.

I can't imagine a society with absolutely no solidarity. For me, it's a nightmare. And I don't want to live in a place like that.

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

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

'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.

There seem to be more women producers than men.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.