David’s Reviews > Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1960s: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood > Status Update

A film is not written or shot during the six months or so allotted to it, but during the thirty or forty years which precede its conception. The filmmaker as soon as he types out the first letter of his script on his typewriter, only needs to know how to let himself go, how to let himself get absorbed in a passive task. He only needs to be himself at each moment.

On the nouvelle vague:

For Rohmer the greatest innovation was making films cheaply, while Truffaut is explicit that there was no aesthetic programme: for him the nouvelle vague meant to make a first film with a reasonably personal theme before you were 35 and simply an attempt to rediscover a certain independence which was lost somewhere around 1924.