Rivette shot the film in long sequence shots that capture well Renoir’s modern spirit, in a magical balance of fantasy and reality. He limits himself to a few “light” questions to get Renoir talking about his films, expressing himself in a very “physical” and seemingly detached and ironic way, for example: “I think that all the characters of a film need to be active, except for one who remains passive and endures everything, and just be a mouth that swallows everything, a stomach that digests anything: the filmmaker. All the elements that he absorbs must be active: the scenes, the characters, and everything else, have to be alive. The filmmaker, on the contrary, has to pretend to be dead, or, better still, asleep: he opens his mouth slightly and swallows everything, he digests it all and gives it back transformed.”

Flavio Vergerio, in Cinema, del nostro tempo, Flavio Vergerio (ed.), CSC-Editrice Il Castoro, Milan, 1998