Cannes Quotes

We are the creatives with teeth. We know ideas are more important than our personal wellbeing.

There would have been no Beats deal without the Samsung deal. It showed the number one company the importance of connecting with culture.

You know, some people say that Cannes is the worst place in the world to see cinema. It's a paradox. They have the new films , lots of interesting films premiering there for the first time. At the same time it's such a mess and a confusion. You have to run from one screening to another.

I ended up meeting this guy Stefan Simchowitz, who produced Requiem for a Dream and also went to AFI. I randomly met him in Cannes. By September of 2000, we had made a deal with this company that he was working with. They merged with us and in January of 2001, we opened WireImage. It was pretty crazy because I only started shooting celebrity stuff in 1998 - literally two and a half years later, I'm opening this company.

Italy to me is like the mean mother. Whatever I do, it's never good enough. People say I'm the queen of Cannes, but in Italy I get turned down for work.

I like doing the promotional work. It's part of the film's process. Cannes was very wonderful to premiere.

I've wanted to make a film about French youth since I went to Cannes with my first film 'Kids' in 1995 ... Scribe's screenplay is about French kids today, and the world today. Just like my films 'Kids' and 'Ken Park', this will be a movie like you have never seen before.

In terms of finding that first international recognition of my work, coming back to Cannes is such a milestone in my life because it began actually with 'Devdas'.

Elle Fanning was fifteen when we started [The Neon Demon]. She turned seventeen during the shoot. Four weeks before Cannes, she turned eighteen. She had her prom at Cannes.

There's this Ryan Gosling quote that I steal all the time - I watched an interview with him in Cannes - and he said picking roles is like listening to songs on the radio: There can be a lot of really great songs in a row, but then one comes on that just makes you want to dance.

If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

Sundance felt like a natural fit. I love coming here, and I do think that this festival suits my films rather than most of the festivals I've been to. I'm not going to Cannes, you know.

I really understood what was happening in Cannes. I was in a restaurant during a break and when I came out 2 hours later, 500 people were waiting for me at the exit. It was total chaos. They literally had to carry me to the car.

If you approach Cannes with a sense of humor, nothing is that bad. You have to take it for what it is; otherwise, its silly.

Ever since the movie premiered at Cannes, I've had a sudden surge of scripts and interest.

Sooner or later, all games become serious.

The first time that I came to Cannes, I think it was in 1953, I was 18 and unknown.

I've been delighted by Cannes and Toronto but I keep saying I don't know how good we're going to be received in America because that's where it's most challenging

Cannes is a very strange place. I tried to show up as best I could and to try not to be cynical.

I always go to the Cannes Film Festival and it's just such a glamorous time.

There has never been a female director who has won an Oscar. There has only been one woman who won at the Cannes Film Festival.

Each year we go to the Cannes film festival and I tend to have all my friends pile in the back of my car and we'll drive from London. The poor production company think they're only putting me up and suddenly they've got eight people sleeping on my hotel room floor.

Every year there's a jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Getting on the jury is very competitive in France. Not because the French love cinema, but because they love to judge.

I actually remember getting asked when we were at the Cannes Film Festival, what I expected to do next. I remember feeling like there was no way I could've imagined that something like Tetro would have happened to me.

I'd met Sharon Tate at the Cannes Film Festival.

The Cannes film festival is about big-budget films but also remarkable films made in different political regimes by film-makers with little resources.

As a director, or just a film fan who wants to enjoy the festival, Cannes is the worst place to be. But it must be a paradise for distributors and importers.

People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.

Rome was not built in one day.

When I have to go to Cannes, that is boring to me.

It’s the opening of Manderlay in Cannes, and I’m sitting next to this guy who’s writing for a tiny fictitious French paper called ‘On the Sunny Side,’ and he’s writing a review on the film, and he’s obviously bored. Then he tells me about all the cars he owns, and how rich he is, and all these things... So, at a certain point, he says, "So what do you do?" Then I take out this very strange hammer we have in the Danish building business, and I say, "I kill." And then I kill him. It is as stupid as it sounds.

The monster has escaped Elba!" "The tyrant has landed at Cannes!" "Bonaparte meets the troops." "Napoleon approaches Paris." "His Imperial Majesty has entered the capital.

I was asked to go to Cannes to present Amores Perros. And little did I know that this film would be huge. I saw it for the first time in Cannes, and it was the first time I'd seen myself on such a big screen. And it had a huge impact on me - it was the strangest feeling.

You hear people saying, 'Oh I'm so tired, I've had enough of Cannes.' How can you have enough of Cannes? It's just the best place to be, like a fairytale.

For many years I enjoyed the pleasure of cruising on my yacht all summer long and these were my best holidays. In mid-May, we'd start in St Tropez. I'd collect my bikinis from my home there and then we'd go up to Cannes for the Film Festival, on to Monte Carlo for the Grand Prix and then to Italy.

Arguably, the Venice Film Festival is the second best film festival in the world, after Cannes.

When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.

Mounting those red stairs [in Cannes] is something I've done with a very different intention many times. So it's interesting any time you witness those shifts of perspective. The beach scenes were also fun. It felt very strange and very theatrical to kind of commandeer it and have La Mer booming over the speakers.

This is what we have all come to Cannes for: for something different, experimental, a tilting at windmills, a great big pole-vault over the barrier of normality by someone who feels that the possibilities of cinema have not been exhausted by conventional realist drama.

After Cannes every year, I end up going to some foreign country I've never been to before and introducing myself to a new religion - I'll go to Bali and research Hinduism, or I'll go to Thailand and get another tattoo from Thai tattoo artist Ajarn Noo Kanpai.

When the film [Certified Copy] was in the Cannes Festival, I realized that the fact of having it shot in a different culture, in a different language, in a different setting, that wasn't mine and that I didn't belong to, gave me a totally different relationship to the film. When I was sitting in the audience during the official screening in Cannes, I didn't feel that it was my film.

Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica.

I don't believe in competition for artistic things. I just like the atmosphere of the Cannes festival. I don't want to win anything or lose anything.

The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.

We did receive some questions about the film's [Aquarius] sexuality in Cannes, but they came from the press rather than audiences.

The kind of sleep that I had during my own film [Certified Copy] screening in Cannes is different. It's not because of the specificity of the film. It was because of my relationship as an author to this film. Usually when I take my films to festivals, I feel incredibly anxious about them. I wonder how it will be received, how the audience will react. I feel deeply responsible for them. Whereas this time, I didn't have that responsibility on my shoulders.

Vincent Gallo has put a curse on my colon and a hex on my prostate. He called me a 'fat pig' in the New York Post and told the New York Observer I have 'the physique of a slave-trader.' He is angry at me because I said his 'The Brown Bunny' was the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival... it is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of 'The Brown Bunny.'

Being with Al Gore on the red carpet in Cannes was exciting - he's like a rock star unto himself!

I was really nervous about people booing, because my mother had gone for a film 20 years earlier and had a terrible time with people booing, whistling, so I knew that in Cannes people can get aggressive.