"Jean Cocteau at his romantic and slightly camp best, playful, poetic, showing how the lowest budget can be transformed into magic and a film that is unforgettable."

"Chanel fostered friendships throughout the arts, one of the most intimate with Jean Cocteau. Painter, poet, novelist and film director Cocteau provided the dialogue for Robert Bresson’s second feature, a bitter romantic melodrama adapting a Diderot anecdote to the present day. Chanel was also one of the first to recognize Bresson’s talents. In 1932, a decade before he began making films, she commissioned the then-painter-and-photographer to shoot her "Bijoux de diamants" jewelry collection."

"Cocteau, black-and-white, with Jean Marais. That was [a] way of telling stories…very, very [strangely]. I was very shocked because everything [becomes] possible [when] you can present your story in a poetic way. And the voice of the actor… When you are young, you understand [here] that even if you are not handsome, you can find love, because the girl loved the beast. [chuckles] It came maybe from my fears when I was young, not to find a girl, not to seduce. You know what I mean?"

"La belle et la bête by Jean Cocteau. It’s the movie that made me want to be an actress. I was four-years-old and my dad had it on laser disc. I was being annoying and bratty or whatever, I was a child, and my dad said, “Hey, watch this movie.” This is when we lived in LA and we had this great giant striped couch and I was wearing — I remember this so well — this corduroy dress with red trim, and I lay there and started watching it. I had a really vivid imagination as a child but I had never seen anything like this in my life. Do you remember the scene where she faints and the Beast carries her and he has that incredible cloak that looks like it is actually the night sky? It’s insane. And he carries her and all the arms — we had these arms in our house, these giant arms that hold the candles — all the arms move and he’s carrying her and walks into her bedroom, and as he goes through the door with her, her clothes go from rags to riches. I remember that being the specific scene where I was like, “I wanna do that. How does that happen? I wanna be a part of that.” That was the day I knew I wanted to be an actress. Also, the way that the Beast smokes, when he looks at her and his skin smokes; and when he takes off the glove and his hand’s just smoking. The whole ending… it’s this weird, twisted ending."

"""And then you get into the contentious fifth film, and I’ve jotted down a bunch of things I thought, well Ran is a possibility. I love Akira Kurosawa‘s take on King Lear, I love what he did to it. I love the movement, the battles. You know, there’s nothing about that film I do not enjoy. Laurel and Hardy’s Way Out West, because I thought that would be a wonderful choice, and it does have, to my mind, the finest dance in the whole of film. But, I thought about A Matter of Life and Death, which was a film that was enormously inspirational when making Good Omens. I felt like that was of the same DNA as the thing that we were doing … Also Bedazzled, the original Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Bedazzled, which again has a lot of the DNA of Good Omens in it. But eventually I came down on Belle et la bête, [Jean] Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. I remember watching it and feeling transported. For me, it’s like dreaming. It does the same that Bride of Frankenstein does, where I can never quite remember the plot when it’s over, I’m just aware that it’s finished now and this wonderful place that I went has gone away. My children do not like black-and-white films, and once, for Father’s Day, my daughters asked what I wanted for Father’s Day, and I asked, “Will you watch this film with me? It’s a foreign language film, so you won’t like it, and it’s black and white, so you won’t like it, but will you watch it with me?” They said, “Well yeah, for Father’s Day we will.” And what I loved was that after 10 minutes, they had forgotten that it was a foreign language film, and they had forgotten that it was a black-and-white film, and they were entranced by this retelling of Beauty and the Beast, made by Cocteau not even on a shoestring; he’s in post-war France, immediately post war, and they had no money for anything. Everything is being improvised. Everything is being created on the fly, and yet what they come up with is something that is so much cooler than any infinite amount of CGI."""