Also Sprach Fritz -- Critique et cinéma

It's not up to me to critique critics. I make a film, it's a child I put out to the world. Everyone has the right to critique it. That's all. Permit me to have the only vanity that makes me happy: public approbation. I don't work for the critics but for audiences whom I hope are young. I don't work for the people of my age because they should already be dead, mee too. I don't want to come to Paris. This cocktail, these few words in front of the public at the Cinémathèque, I told Mme Lotte Eisner, this remind me of a monument for an unhappy man who is'nt dead yet. She is right. A young public has really responded. I was moved, very moved, because that proved that I hadn't worked for nothing.

You told us earlier that the director's goal was to critique. Couldn't that be the definition of mise-en-scène?

All art, I believe, should critique something. It isn't enough to say it's good, it's enticing, it's marvellous. In any case, what can one say of a woman who is good? She's a good mother, a good wife. But what can one recount of a bad woman? One ca n speak for hours about her, she is interesting [Laughs]. Yes or no? You say about one that she is good, but the other... The question is "Is she really bad?" "Was right has she?", "What were the circumstances?", "Weren't men responsible?" One could talk all night. And we could talk all night with her. [Laughs] I saw, here in Paris, an English film called Room at the top. There were two women, one very frank, the other very bad. Simone Signoret was the most interesting, not because she was the better actress, but because her sentiments were the more passionate.