Claire Denis

I hate family pressures and family responsibilities. I'm more comfortable as a stranger. I always imagined I could just live in a hotel. I'm afraid of family.

I am the eldest child; it's lonely at the top.

Chocolat' was a sort of statement of my own childhood, recognizing I experienced something from the end of the colonial era and the beginning of independence as I was a child that really made me aware of things I never forgot - a sort of childhood that made me different when I was a student in France.

I reproach so many things about my family, but on the other hand, I kept asking them to be my family.

A film takes a lot of time, and yet not enough to share with the people you're making the movie with, I think.

I am always asked, 'You grew up in Africa?' Every time I introduce a film, or I'm interviewed, 'You grew up in Africa?'

Because TV is mostly close up, it has to be fast. And because it has to be fast, you don't have time to explain completely, by a sequence shot, what's happening between people. So instead of experiencing what's happening, say, when a couple is dancing, dialogue is used to explain.

I don't know - music in film, for me, is not another part of a soundtrack; it is something that also helps to approach a character, to foresee the type of image - you see what I mean - it's like a part of the process.

What I don't like so much is to give explanations about people's behaviour... I'm not interested in making conclusions. I would never think about myself or anyone else, 'Well, this happened, this happened, this happened, so this must be the result.' It doesn't work like that with me.

I've heard it said many times, 'Let's work on the look of the film,' but that doesn't work with me.

When making a film, if I feel nothing in my body, I can't work. I have to touch. I have to feel. I never stop touching.

I can be unkind to someone in the street or in the subway - I'm a bad-tempered person - but I'm unable to be unkind to a character. They exist because of me, and I have responsibility for them.