Biografía

Concentrates on intelligent, articulate protagonists who frequently fail to own up to their desires.

Avoids extradiegetic music.

Populates his movies with people in their twenties.

The settings of his films are often on pleasant beaches and popular resorts, notably in La coleccionista (1967), Pauline en la playa (1983), El rayo verde (1986) and Cuento de verano (1996).

Prefers to use non-professional actors in his films.

Francois Truffaut in a 1973 interview: "Rohmer is the best French director now. He became famous very late compared to the rest of us, but for 15 years he's been behind us all the time. He's influenced us from behind for a long time.".

His ten favorite films are True Heart Susie (1919), The General (1926), Sunrise (1927), La Règle du jeu (1939), Ivan the Terrible (1944), Journey to Italy (1954), Red River (1948), Vertigo (1958), Pickpocket (1959) and La Pyramide humaine (1961).

A former professor of literature.

His stage name was fashioned together in homage to actor and director Erich von Stroheim and 19th-century English novelist Sax Rohmer.

Regarded film as "the last refuge of poetry" and the only contemporary art form from which metaphor can still spring naturally and spontaneously.

What I would most like to do is to make movies with a completely invisible camera.

We have to show what lies beyond behavior, while knowing we can't show anything but behavior.

[on his work] You can say that my work is closer to the novel - to a certain classic style of novel which the cinema is now taking over - than to other forms of entertainment, like the theater.

[on Emmanuelle Riva's performance in Hiroshima, mon amour (1959)] She isn't a classical heroine, at least not one that a certain classical cinema has habituated us to see, from David Griffith [D.W. Griffith] to Nicholas Ray.

[on Mi noche con Maud (1969)] What retains your interest in this film is the fact that my characters have a discourse to give, while in the majority of films, this is absent. Note that in general, I have always had misgivings about discursive films. But you are often attracted by things which seem the most unattractive and the most perilous to you. My idea was precisely to integrate a discourse into the film and to avoid the film being at the service of the discourse, at the service of the thesis. But throughout history, starting with the Greeks, discourse has been very important in the theatre. The Greek theatre was composed of maxims, of moral reflection, which didn't prevent it from being real theatre.