You have to go with your sensibility. There is nothing else. I've been called an intellectual, but of course I'm not. Writing is unbelievably difficult, but I have to do it, because everything must originate with me. I've been called a Jansenist, which is madness. I'm the opposite. I'm interested in impressions. I'll give you an example, taken from L'Argent. When I'm on the Grands Boulevards, the first thing I think is, "How do they impress me?" And the answer is that they impress me as a mass of legs and a sound of feet on the pavements. I tried to communicate this impression by picture and by sound ... There has to be a shock at the moment of doing, there has to be a feeling that the humans and things to be filmed are new, you have to throw surprises on film. That's what happened in the scene on the Grands Boulevards. ... I could feel the steps, I focused on the protagonist's legs, and that way I could propel him through the crowd to where he needed to be. That's the Grands Boulevards, as far as I'm concerned, all the motion. Otherwise, I might as well have used a picture postcard. The thing that struck me when I used to go to the cinema was that everything had been wanted in advance, down to the last detail. ... Painters do not know in advance how their picture is going to turn out, a sculptor cannot tell what his sculpture will be, a poet does not plan a poem in advance. ...

You will have noticed in L'Argent there are a series of close-ups whose only function is to add sensation. When the father, a piano-player, drops a glass, his daughter is in the kitchen. Her dustpan and sponge are ready. I do not then enter the room, but cut immediately to a close shot which I like very much, the wet floor with the sound of the sponge. That is music, rhythm, sensation. ... Increasingly, what I am after - and with L'Argent it became almost a working method - is to communicate the impressions I feel.

Robert Bresson
from an interview with Michel Ciment (1983)
abridged by Kent Jones for BFI Modern Classics: L'Argent