121 Quotes by Michel Hazanavicius

I looked at a lot of photos from Hollywood in the ’20s, photographs of silent movies being filmed all over the world which are very specific and very evocative. Berenice, the lead actress, is my wife. She really followed the same path with me.

Actually, I met a lot of directors and most of them have that fantasy to make a silent movie because for directors it’s the purest way to tell a story. It’s about creating images that tell a story and you don’t need dialogue for that.

When you do not have the dialogue to explain things, you will use everything to show and to tell the story. I think that this is what makes you believe that it is impeccable.

But I don’t think of myself as a foreigner or a Frenchman! I just think of myself as a director. Whether I’m French or Australian or whatever, it’s really not important.

In France, it's really different the way you live. It's a non-religious country. The public space is not religious; religion is a private thing.

I always loved silent movies. I was not a specialist, but I loved them. And when I started directing, I became really fascinated by the format - how it works, the device of the silent movie. It's not the same form of expression as a talkie. The lack of sounds makes you participate in the storytelling.

Silence is a universal language. It's like music or painting.

I think all the history of the Jewish people is about adaptation.

The silent movie is an emotional cinema: it's sensory; the fact that you don't go through a text brings you back to a basic way of telling a story predicated on the feelings you have created.