20 Quotes by Louis Malle

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

Jazz is my childhood.

We poets have no need for drugs to attain the borderline between life and death.

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.