“The awful thing about the cinema is the possibility of moving about exactly as one wants. You say, ‘Well, I must explain this emotion, and I’ll do it by going into flashback and showing you what happened to this man when he was two years old.’ It’s very convenient, of course, but it’s also enfeebling. If you have to make the emotion understood simply through his behavior, then the discipline brings a kind of freedom with it. There’s really no freedom without discipline, because without it one falls back on the disciplines one constructs for oneself, and they are really formidable. It’s much better if the restraints are imposed from the outside.”
Jean Renoir, interviewed by Louis Marcorelles (Sight and Sound, Spring 1962)