Denis Villeneuve

“I must say, I am a 10,000-times better director because I am in therapy. I'm serious. I can understand more the actors. I can manipulate them more easily.”

“I'm a very slow screenwriter. It takes time for me to write a screenplay. Also, I feel it's not my strength.”

“I'm very sensitive about the fact that there's not a lot of good work for women in cinema that also deals with strong characters. But 'strong character' doesn't mean 'masculine character' - but something that finds the strength in femininity and the beauty in femininity. And something that says you can find femininity in men in some way.”

“I was saying to myself that I would love to try it once, just one time, to know what it's like to make a movie in Hollywood. I was so curious because most of my favorite directors were there. There's a history; there's a way of working.”

“Very early on, I was writing stories, and I was amazed at Spielberg's movies when I was young. Coming from the countryside, I was so impressed with the way he was able to tell stories and the way he was able to deal with le merveilleux - the wonders. Very quickly, he became for me a massive hero, and he introduced me to the world of a director.”

“I feel, since 2001, this huge need for Americans to have superheroes on the screen. This idea that a super-being will protect you. That this being can go above the law but, at the end of the day, would be a good force and defeat the evil. This idea that this half-god exists. This need in the subconscious of America to find these gods.”

“When you do casting in Hollywood, it's always the same question: 'Who is available?'”

“I was raised with James Bond. I love James Bond movies. I would love to do a James Bond movie one day. Action is very cinematic.”

“The thing is that when you are a director, you need to be involved in a lot of different fields. You must be a psychologist, an architecture expert; you must be a choreographer.”

“Cannes is the oldest film festival in the world, and I've long dreamed of having one of my films there in competition. It's a dream that lay dormant for a long time; I stopped believing in it.”

“I think I'm attracted to subjects that I'm afraid of. It's a way to approach things I am afraid of, things that bring fear in my heart, and try to understand them, try to deal with them. It's like demons. I try to approach it and understand it... I'm just visiting fears.”

“'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' Big, big, big smash for me. My birth of the love of cinema was born with 'Close Encounters' and '2001.' Those sci-fi movies I saw when I was a little kid.”

“I'm someone who thinks that the world would be a better place if there was a big middle class. I mean, middle class is peace. In a perfect world, everybody would have enough to eat and we'd be living in security. It's obvious. I'm very happy to pay my taxes and all that. I would say I'm more of a Social Democrat.”

“When I was a kid, I was always going to bed creating a story, and that was the birth of filmmaking for me. I would like going to the dream-state by telling the story to someone else in my mind. That was my imaginary friend; it was an imaginary audience listening to my story.”

“For me, masculinity is about control, and femininity is more of an embrace, the art of listening. It's very inspiring to explore the shadows of masculinity and femininity, and the tensions between both, and the place of women in the world right now.”

“I started in documentaries. I started alone with a camera. Alone. Totally alone. Shooting, editing short documentaries for a French-Canadian part of CBC. So to deal with the camera alone, to approach reality alone, meant so much. I made a few dozen small documentaries, and that was the birth of a way to approach reality with a camera.”

“Film is pop art. It's not whether it's auteur cinema or not; that's a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.”

“Each movie I make has its own heroes, and the two heroes for me in 'Arrival' are Amy Adams and Joe Walker, the editor. We worked very, very hard, and it was, by far, the longest editing process.”

“If you don't deal with your shadows, you are condemned to repeat the same mistake over and over, as a human being or as a society.”

“I think that the world is very complex. I think that the movie is a good way to ask questions. To give answers, you would write a lot of books.”