Céline Sciamma

Céline Sciamma 2015

Céline Sciamma (born November 12, 1978) is a French film director and screenwriter.

Quotes

• The last scene came really, really early, disconnected from even the idea of a woman painter…I wanted to write a love story and I thought, ‘What do I want to tell?’ And that scene came up really, really quickly, alone, by itself. The weird compass of the film was its last scene. That’s a compass, but it’s a high pressure one.
  • On her creative process for Portrait of a Lady on Fire in "Portrait of a Lady on Fire Filmmaker Céline Sciamma Is Trying to Break Your Heart", IndieWire (5 December 2019)

• We want people to have their heart broken and think about themselves, but enjoy this experience of this strong love story...But it’s also about the memory of a love story. It’s a lot about the present, the rise of desire, but it’s also about what’s left of a love story. What’s the memory of a love story. There’s these two timelines that sometimes are contiguous, contaminating one another. We are trying to propose another politic of love where it’s not about possession or donation or eternal love or death or eternity or whatever. It’s more about love as a dynamic that can only grow.
  • On the type of love story she was drawn to portray in "Portrait of a Lady on Fire Filmmaker Céline Sciamma Is Trying to Break Your Heart", IndieWire (5 December 2019)

• It's a very bourgeois industry. There's resistance to radicalism, and also less youth in charge. "A film can be feminist?" They don't know this concept. They don't read the book. They don't even know about the fact that "male gaze" exists. You can tell it's a country where there’s a lot of sexism, and a strong culture of patriarchy.
  • On the tepid reception of her film Portrait of a Lady on Fire in France in "Céline Sciamma: 'In France, they don’t find the film hot. They think it lacks flesh, it’s not erotic'", The Guardian (21 February 2020)

• We call models "muses", and that's mostly what's left in the history of art for women artists...Dora Maar was the muse of Picasso but also a photographer at the centre of the surrealist scene. And |Gabrièle Picabia was the wife of [avant-garde painter |Francis] Picabia but also the brain of his work. It's about co-creation, not this fetishised, silent woman standing there beautiful and mute
  • On how women typically take a backseat to the "artist" despite their accomplishments in "Céline Sciamma: 'In France, they don't find the film hot. They think it lacks flesh, it's not erotic'", The Guardian (21 February 2020)

• A few weeks ago I went to a screening of 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' at Utopia. I'm not a very introspective person but when I get on that stage, it feels even more overwhelming than showing my films at the Cannes film festival. Because standing there, I'm so close to my past. I can see how far I've come.
  • "Céline Sciamma on the Cinema Utopia, the cinema of her teens", Sight & Sound/BFI (22 October 2020)

• I'm not saying that you have to love it all. [...] But, yes, you should love it all.
  • "Céline Sciamma’s Quest for a New, Feminist Grammar of Cinema", The New Yorker (31 January 2022)