Chantal Akerman Inspirational Quotes (10)

I wanted to write and then I saw Pierrot and I understand that I could express myself in a more... Also probably, I had an intuition that if I was going to only write, I will stay in one room all the time and never go out. I felt that if I was going to make movies, I would have to communicate with people and it would be good for me.

Lars von Trier is very, very, very clever about women. He gives the woman a space that I don't know any filmmaker does. Because in Breaking The Waves, protagonist Emily Watson is the Christ. Which man is doing that? I don't know any man giving that space to a woman. No one.

The jail thing is very, very present in all of my work... Sometimes not very frontally. The jail is coming from the camps, because my mother was in the camps, and she internalized that and gave it to me.

She who seeks shall find, find all to well, and end up clouding her vision with her own preconceptions.

I'm Jewish. That's all. So I am in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.

I went at 4:30 in the morning to a café 500 meters from my place. And it was another city... Totally different than where I go every day. And I said, God, I will do that again. That's another subject I want to do. It's my street, suddenly different at 5:00 in the morning. I can shoot for one week. That's enough to make a movie.

Look at Charlotte Gainsbourg, in the Lars von Trier film Antichrist. She's unbelievable. She doesn't act she's there. She's great. And you love her for that, because it's so daring, what she has to do. And she does it as if it is nothing. I think she's brave. I fell in love with her when I saw that film. She is a revelation. Total revelation.

I had an awful joke about Auschwitz I drove everybody crazy with that joke. But that joke makes me feel good. You know what cuit means? When something is cooked. It's a joke like that: What are the birds doing when they fly over Auschwitz? 'Cuit! Cuit!' It's awful, but it's desacralizing. For me, it's good.

When I'm in my neighborhood, I don't see anything anymore, because I'm so used to it. When I go somewhere else, suddenly, I'm alive. I'm on alert, and I can be fresh.

Have you seen the film Histoires D'Amérique? It's also a mixture of humor and monologue, and it shows how the Jewish humor comes from drama and tragedy.