Jean-Luc Godard quotes

Jean-Luc Godard was a French-Swiss film director and screenwriter, regarded as a pioneer of the French New Wave cinema movement. His innovative storytelling, visual style, and unconventional film techniques transformed world cinema. He inspired generations of filmmakers and remains an icon of cinematic experimentation. Here are 44 of his quotes:

All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun. (Jean-Luc Godard)
A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end ... but not necessarily in that order. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
To be or not to be. That's not really a question. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body-both go together, they can't be separated. (Jean-Luc Godard)
In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato! View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
Every edit is a lie. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
[I think] the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera; the movie is the reality of the movie moving from reality to the camera. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
American pictures usually have no subject, only a story. A pretty woman is not a subject. Julia Roberts doing this and that is not a subject. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
I would never see a good movie for the first time on television. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents. (Jean-Luc Godard)
Suddenly, I don't know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it. - Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
The world isn't a sad place, it's just big. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard
i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle. View quote
Jean-Luc Godard