Chantal
Akerman: You
can see him excluding himself from the world in an almost autistic manner. For
people like me, who started doing film because of him, it is a terrible fright.
And the fact that the long evolution that Godard has been through can lead to
this, almost brings me to despair. He was kind of a pioneer, an inventor who
didn’t care much about anybody or anything. And that a man at this stage of his
life isolates himself, should also be a lesson for us other film makers.
Woody Allen:
I think he’s a brilliant innovator. I don’t always love every film he’s made. I think he’s very
inventive, but sometimes his inventions are taken by other people and used
better. But he’s certainly one of the innovators of cinema.
Paul Thomas Anderson: I love Godard in a very film school way. I can’t say
that I’ve ever been emotionally attacked by him. Where I have been emotionally
attacked by Truffaut.
Michelangelo Antonioni: Godard flings reality in our faces, and I’m struck by
this. But never by Truffaut.
Ingmar Bergman:
I’ve never been able to appreciate any of his films, nor even understand them.
Truffaut and I used to meet on several occasions at film festivals. We had an
instant understanding that extended to his films. But Godard: I find his films
affected, intellectual, self-obsessed and, as cinema, without interest and
frankly dull. Endless and tiresome. Godard is a desperate bore. I’ve always
thought that he made films for critics. He made one here in Sweden, Masculin Féminin, so boring
that my hair stood on end.
Luis Buñuel:
I’ll give him two years more, he is just a fashion.
Jean-Luc Godard: I am not an auteur, well, not now anyway. We once
believed we were auteurs but we weren’t. We had no idea, really. Film is over.
It’s sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile
phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.
Werner Herzog:
Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when
compared to a good kung fu film.
Fritz Lang: I
like him a great deal: he is very honest, he loves the cinema, he is just as
fanatical as I was. In fact, I think he tries to continue what we started one
day, the day when we began making our first films. Only his approach is
different. Not the spirit.
Roman Polanski:
In fact the worst thing possible is to be absolutely certain about things.
Hitler, for example, must have been convinced in the certainty of his ideas and
that he was right. I don’t think he did anything without believing in it,
otherwise he wouldn’t have done it to start with. And I think Jean-Luc
Godard believes he makes good films, but maybe they aren’t that good.
Satyajit Ray:
Godard especially opened up new ways of… making points, let us say. And he
shook the foundations of film grammar in a very healthy sort of way, which is
excellent.
Quentin Tarantino:
To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both
revolutionized their forms.
François Truffaut:
You’re nothing but a piece of shit on a pedestal. […] You fostered the myth,
you accentuated that side of you that was mysterious, inaccessible and
temperamental, all for the slavish admiration of those around you. You need to
play a role and the role needs to be a prestigious one; I’ve always had the
impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless,
daily but necessary job. But you, you’re the Ursula Andress of militancy, you
make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, you make
two or three duly startling remarks and then you disappear again, trailing
clouds of self-serving mystery.
Orson Welles:
He’s the definitive influence if not really the first film artist of
this last decade, and his gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take
him very seriously as a thinker—and
that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares
about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the
head of a pin. But what’s so admirable about him is his marvelous contempt for
the machinery of movies and even movies themselves—a kind of anarchistic,
nihilistic contempt for the medium—which, when he’s at his best and most
vigorous, is very exciting.
Wim Wenders: For
me, discovering cinema was directly connected to his films. I was living in
Paris at the time. When Made
in USA opened, I went to the
first show—it was around noon—and I sat there until midnight. I saw it six
times in a row.
Photo: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean-Luc
Godard gather to distribute copies of the Maoist newspaper “La Cause du Peuple”
on the street after it is banned by the government, Paris, 1970.
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