Louis Malle Quotations

You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.

I didn't feel like going any further in this scene with the boy. He was not a professional actor, and if I had pushed the scene any further it would have destroyed the tone of the movie.

When you are working on a script, the story itself is not difficult. You say this would happen and then this, resulting perhaps in this. And the dialogue you make as true as you can.

Suddenly this idea came to me for a film about incest. It was almost a daydream. I wrote out 60 or 70 pages in a few days. I showed them to friends, got a warm reaction, decided to make the film.

Just because the movie is about incest does not make it autobiographical. Yes, I have a mother, but that does not make me unique.

The Oedipus complex is like a joke. It takes years to discover that there is a dream ideal, an initiating mother, in our subconscious.

If you have someone on the set for the hair, why would you not have someone for the words?

Well, Fellini... there is always Fellini.

I think predictability has become the rule and I'm completely the opposite -- I like spectators to be disturbed.

You see the world much better through a camera

It is only when memory is filtered through imagination that the films we make will have real depth.

Filmmakers don't work for posterity. We create with celluloid and chemical pigments that don't last very long. They fade away. In 200 years there will be nothing left of our work but dust.

The longer I live, the less I trust ideas, the more I trust emotions.

Memory is not frozen, it's very much alive, it moves, it changes.