Kieslowski Quotes

We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.

I sensed a mutual indifference behind polite smiles and had the overwhelming impression that, more and more frequently, I was watching people who didn't really know why they were living.

You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.

Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it.

That's the greatest sin a director can commit; to make a film simply because he wants to make a film.

I'm not really sure who I am but I love reading books.

Of course, you could, no doubt, call my going to film school the biggest mistake I ever made.

But I reckon that this realm of higher needs, of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us.

I don’t like myself very much, so i try not to observe myself too often. I made a documentary once entitled Talking Heads. I asked people two questions: “Who are you” and “What do you want?” Afterwards, I asked myself those questions. I realized that I didn’t have any answers. I don’t know who I am, and I don’t know what I want. If anything, I’d like some peace and quiet, but I’ve never achieved it, and I probably never will. So I will never have what I really want.

I'm not someone who remembers dreams for long. I forget them as soon as I wake up- if I've had any, that is.

This, among other things, is where the magic of the screen lies: that suddenly, as an audience, you find yourself in a state of tension because you're in a world shown to you by the director. That world is so coherent, so comprehensive, so succinct that you're transported into it and experience tension because you sense the tension between the characters.

Do you think Western Civilization has come to an end? "We are clearly going through a cultural crisis at the moment. It's a phase where we are trying to distinguish values of life. People are looking for a solution and perhaps they will find it. But the radicality of the search will change their view of life." So there is a cultural crises? "There is a general crisis, but it's not the end of the world. But the crisis it total? "And so what? The crisis means that now the world is at the bottom of a sinus curve. In the nature of things, it will now rise and fall again later.

The children would beat me up, that's true. Or rather, they wanted to beat me up, but somehow or other I usually managed to escape.

For me, a certain sign of quality or class in art is that when I read, see or listen to something, I suddenly get an acute, clear feeling that somebody's formulated something which I've experienced or thought; exactly the same thing but with the help of a better sentence or better visual arrangement or better composition of sounds than I could ever have imagined. ... It's a description, an image which deeply concerns you, which deeply moves you and is your image.

I do not consider myself to be an artist at all. As you know, I have never said I was an artist, since I think that word has to be reserved for certain special people and events of which – one has to admit – there have been fewer and fewer in recent decades. There are fewer and fewer people worthy of the name. That is also why I do not use the word of myself.

...coldness, cynicism, distance – all these things have a common identity somewhere. And this is very characteristic of our era. I have the impression that we are increasingly cold and cynical toward each other and create ever-greater distances. I even have the impression that I can remember a time when it was warmer, and that over the fifty years of my life I have been watching us grow colder around each and every one of us. This is a trend we are witnessing and that everything in the world changes at some point. It can easily be observed and so it finds its way into the films I have made, for I have tried to depict the times in which we live. (*1995*)