"After spotting a then-unknown Delphine Seyrig in a New York theater production, director Alain Resnais cast her as the female lead of his superb and enigmatic meditation on time and memory, then enlisted Chanel to transform his ingenue into a star. The exquisite gowns she designed are integral to the film’s highly influential visual design, and Chanel and Seyrig began a long-lasting friendship, united by mutual respect and their devotion to the cause of women."

"I don’t want to say much about La strada other than that it’s the reason why I am here. When you watch this movie, no matter who you are, you get the sense that this is something special that couldn’t have been made for television or heard as a radio play. It’s not Alain Resnais, it’s very accessible, and yet it has cinematic purity. This is a mark of how depressing the movie business has gotten—we don’t make these kinds of movies anymore, movies where there’s just a natural consensus that they’re good. Where you don’t have to wait for critics to say so, because everybody can feel it."

"I’ll go back to the one that hit me hard a long time ago, Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais. I think the first cuts are so deep, you know, when your hard disc is still pretty empty, and these first films hit you so hard where you go, “Oh my god, I didn’t know this existed, it’s so beautiful.” Hiroshima mon amour was a film by a filmmaker where I didn’t know this language was even possible on film — I was looking at wax museum films and Westerns and war movies and horror movies and everything, but not this one; it really woke up my eyes for something else. It was so poetic and so cool, and just really enjoyable."

"Next is a documentary called Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, which is a story of then and now, of concentration camps. That had a major influence on me, again, for the poetry, if you can call it that, of the documentary, but also the way he used time, the way he used two time zones, two sets of material, to make his point, and to give the film, which obviously had some astounding, alarming images in it, but without a lot of babble, of explanation, by contrasting what it once was and what it is now. It was very moving to me, and I think that was inspirational, again, in the [Up] films I did with these children, which I’m still doing. But I could see how you could time travel in documentary, and it makes both sets of material more powerful. Of course, the film is incredibly powerful anyway. But nonetheless, he’d found a style of doing it, a way of doing it… It’s just, the power of those images, without endless babble, was, to me, a very strong lesson."