5 Quotes by Jean-Pierre Melville

There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle... Perhaps...

All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact recreation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me.

I believe you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage.

I don’t know what will be left of me fifty years from now. I suspect that all films will have aged terribly and that the cinema probably won’t even exist anymore. My guess is that the final disappearance of cinemas will take place around the year 2020, so in fifty years’ time, there will be nothing but television.

I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.