J.L.G

'Westerns are a way for American cinema to recount the legend without telling the truth. There's war, and then there's the way you recount it. Whether it's CNN or Bruce Willis, it's all the same.'

'I thought I could join that family, and later I realised I'd been rejected' (he uses the impersonal third- person 'on' " one - but it's apparent he means himself). 'I left my actual family and found another family among the Nouvelle Vague " and it really was a little family, for a while. Then we realised that some of them had joined the big family and stayed in it.' By the 'big family', he means the outside world, the commercial system of cinema. He makes an exception for Rohmer - 'The only one who stayed outside.' Of his old confrres, Godard says, 'It used to be a little ghetto, now it's become a big ghetto. They have their own little place. We' " 'nous', meaning Godard, and presumably Miville too " 'have no place, none at all.'

Most films today, he avers, makes no sense anyway. Or perhaps it's just the way he sees them. When he and Miville went to see The Sixth Sense, she had to explain to him that he'd missed the point. 'I thought everyone else was dead and Bruce Willis was still alive. That's much better than the other way round.'

' There is, however, one recent American film which Godard really admires " as good, he says, as the great French ethnographic film- maker Jean Rouch in his day. It's Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny. Am I hearing this right? Jean-Luc Godard likes The Brown Bunny? The universally reviled vanity project that was practically laughed off screen in Cannes two years ago? 'Ah oui. Everyone hated it, it was magnifique. So what if it's narcissistic? So much the better if a narcissist makes a good film.'