Holy Motors Q&A and Quotes.

Leos Carax Holy Motors Q&A

“It’s very difficult to be really interested in images today.”

“I love editing. The problem in editing is always where to stop. It has to come to an end at some point.

“The only problems are to do with the approach – it’s not that interesting – the whole digital chain today isn’t ready so no one knows anything. Everything is complicated and takes time with no results because in the end the films are projected in the same way on screens that people aren’t familiar with. No one knows anything. Digital was sold in that way. Just how a lab sells a drug. But for an illness that we don’t even know of and we don’t know if people will recover from it. That’s a problem.

“But in terms of editing… pure editing… it’s all about taking the audience into consideration for the first time. We make films for the dead and then show them to the living but we still have to think of the living at one point or another. Perhaps it didn’t come to me at first, but rather my collaborators: what is the way into the film? It shouldn’t just seem like the end. So I try to pay attention to that, but I’m not sure I succeed.

“Sorry it’s… Talking of cinema, for me it’s a nightmare. But not cinema in the full light of day. It’s a big nightmare. I think cinema is something of the night. The Twisted Road, The Night of the Hunter.

“When you see a tracking shot in early cinema, from a Murnau film or something, you really get a sense of the heaviness of the equipment. If a camera follows a man at dusk for example, you really get the sense that God is watching him.

“Today, if you’re watching a man being followed by a camera you don’t get that sense at all. So these feelings need to be created through other means. It’s interesting, but that’s how it is today.”

“When you try and create something you should position yourself against it. And the problem with computers is that they’re neither for nor against. They’re neither ‘on’ nor ‘off’. They are on ‘pause’ you push a button and there you go. There is no experience of time.

“I used to do a lot of takes which made the producers nervous. Today they don’t care, a shot doesn’t cost anything. In order to rediscover the experience, and the risk of doing something, without just pushing a button again and again, one needs to reinvent new risks, new challenges, through the story, or the relationship with the team, through writing and imagination.

“In that sense, changing from one technique to another and the development of techniques is interesting. But that’s the price.”

“… who would carry Monsieur Oscar from one life to the next. A man travelling from life to life, in a giant machine.”

The Master of the Invisible Cameras

“Beauty. They say it’s in the eye. In the eye of the beholder.”

“And if there’s no more beholder?”

“Trois, douze, merdé.”