Best 20 quotes of Jean Renoir on MyQuotes

A Director Makes Only One Movie in His Life. Then He Breaks It Into Pieces and Makes It Again.

A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

I am against great themes and great subjects... You can't film an idea. The camera is an instrument for recording physical impact.

I believe that perfection handicaps cinema.

Is it possible to succeed without any act of betrayal?

Nature is millions of things. And there are millions of ways of understanding its preoccupations.

The advantage of being eighty years old is that one has many people to love.

The foundation of all civilization is loitering.

The real hell of life is that everyone has his reasons.

There is no realism in American films. No realism, but something much better, great truth.

The saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man.

To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.

When a friend speaks to me, whatever he says is interesting.

You see, in this world there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.

Among seekers of truth, painters perhaps come closest to discovering the secret of the balance of forces of the universe, and hence of man's fulfillment.

His nudes and his roses declared to men of this century, already deep in their task of destruction, the stability of the eternal balance of nature.

The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons.

The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.

The world of Rnoir is a single entity. The red of the poppy determines the pose of the young woman with the umbrella. The blue of the sky harmonizes with the sheepskin the young shepheard wears. His pictures are demonstrations of over-all unity. .... Renoir believed in the Chinese legend that a mandarin can be killed at a distance by an unconsciously lethal gesture made in Paris.