French Actress Quotations

The universe is not fair and it is never going to be fair.

I didn't so much choose the film as director Claire Denis chose me.

Rushing the ball is all about ball control. If you run the ball, you control the clock. If you control the clock, you usually control the game.

But the privileges that one has enjoyed and exploited can sometimes turn against you: nobody thinks of you as a director, you are always an actress.

It is in spending oneself that one becomes rich.

You can perform all kind of characters but you cannot change what people feel for you.

It's obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect.

There was a strange atmosphere on the set because we were filming in this large house, which was used for troubled children. You'd go in and find walls had been burnt down. The building was charged with this history and it stayed with us throughout the filming.

It's better to be unfaithful than faithful without wanting to be.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

I couldn't do anything else, I enjoy it so much. But I find it tough.

Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.

Life has brought me work to do on myself these past two years.

There's a flipside to this; if you as an individual have the right to live on your own terms, you must have the right to both succeed and fail on them.

It's the first film that I made where the director was not present under the camera, and it threw me.

I wouldn't mind being in an American film for a laugh, but I certainly don't want to be in Thingy Blah Blah 3, if you know what I mean.

Yes, he wanted me to do Funny Games before, which I didn't want to do because the film was very theoretical - the way people experience violence on screen. There was very little space for fiction, it was more like a sacrifice for the actors than anything else.

I was putting all those pressures on myself.

The reason Ronald Reagan gets slammed for having so badly exacerbated the problem of deficit spending is that he so plainly deserves it.

We were all ruled by the studio system. I signed a contract for seven years.

I've never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life. They didn't choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them.

It's your body and your life and you have an absolute right to do with it as you choose.

You know French means like sophisticated, well educated, so far.

No matter what you do, your person comes through. You can't completely change yourself on the screen. I had in mind someone colder and more in control, but I couldn't do it. This human note just crept in and maybe it's better.

There are, believe it or not, good politicians.

Genre aside, I'd like to make a film about people.

There is virtually nothing I wouldn't be willing to do, to try and make sure that children have a fair shake in life.

There's no way for me to know, but my best guess, as it must be for everyone, is that other people are pretty much like me.

There is no doubt that this film is autobiographical, but at the same time it also tries to portray an ordinary couple in a language that everyone can understand.

We are reinventing the world. We've set the ball spinning with little concern for where and how it's going to stop.

What's nice is that when you have to put a wig on, funny costumes, You know it's like being a little girl playing with accessories.

What the power structure is afraid of is that we're going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it.

When you're a mother and you have a son, you hide your feminine side. It's the fear of incest, Oedipus.

Letting go of things and not being afraid of being ridiculous or over the top-I think that's the main thing for me to work on.

My father is a dentist. He has nothing to do with acting. He is proud of me. I come from a bourgeois family, like the family in The Dreamers.

I'm a liberal where children are concerned, a libertarian where adults are concerned - and thinking very seriously about running for the House of Representatives, for whatever that's worth.

I have been making films for the last 25 years and have played characters created and inspired by others, and I often enjoyed myself doing that.

I got as little as a $75 a week when I started.

James Ivory is very, very subtle in his study of human behavior. I think that he's very aware of the subtleties of women behavior.

I studied, as every little French girl, the piano... I studied for 12 years and then I stopped, because I was very bored with it.

You know I could stop working as an actress and still be doing promotion on movies I did ten years ago. And I don't like to do the same thing forever.

When you work with a director like this you don't have a real challenge because he makes the work very easy. He knows what he wants as a director.

With theatre, I like to compare it to sculpture. It is a shape that you shape. I have this funny image in my head. You can extend it, reduce it.

The studio system collapsed only when Elizabeth Taylor charged $1 million for Cleopatra.

Sometimes you choose the wrong actor, he could be the best actor ever, but he's not cast in the right part then it doesn't work.

The most interesting thing about the idea of money is that it makes it possible to measure something in previous ages we couldn't be sure about, and that something is power.

This book was company for me-I wrote these things when I was in hotels, far from where I normally live. I never intended to publish it.

It is personal, very honest, intimate, I would say, but sometimes the story, the anecdote, can be more or less mine - or not mine.

It's so much better to desire than to have... The moment of desire, when you know something is going to happen - that's the most exalting.

There was a scene where we were making love, but in a very trashy way, and it was supposed to be funny but I didn't feel it was funny.

I learned a lot last year about the current difficulties in independent film making. Money is promised one minute and gone the next. I was bitterly disappointed about Scheherazade. It was one of the best scripts I have ever read.

In Franc, you're with the crew, and you have lunch with them. It's more like a family.

I may move from everywhere and spend two or three years in total isolation. I like being alone a lot. I enjoy that more than anything.

I noticed that when I went to see the rushes or the first showing that there was something quite human in this desperation, and I hadn't planned it.

The French? Upper class. Now, this is not all of France, it's just the French upper class, and it's very true. That's the way that they are, yes.