Education Quote by Jeanne Moreau

Method acting usually sells itself as gritty labor; Jeanne Moreau flips it into a kind of aesthetic hygiene. The provocation in "as a matter of principle" is that she frames what could sound like laziness as ethics. Principle implies discipline, almost austerity, and it dares you to question whose rules define professionalism in cinema: the script supervisor's, the director's, the industry's, or the actor's own.

Coming in "like a blank slate" is a carefully chosen myth. No actor is blank; Moreau was famously intelligent, watchful, and deliberate. The line works because it performs the very posture it describes: a refusal to arrive pre-cooked. In the postwar French film culture she helped define, especially around the New Wave's suspicion of theatrical grandstanding, spontaneity was currency. To not "learn my lines in advance" isn't just technique; it's allegiance to a cinema that wants accidents, overlaps, the quiver of real time. It also shifts power on set. If the actor isn't committed to a fixed delivery, the scene has to negotiate with her in the moment.

"With this approach, I feel clean" lands as the real tell: not purity in a moral sense, but freedom from residue. She casts rehearsal as contamination - other people's rhythms, the dead hand of expectation, the temptation to perform an idea of emotion instead of the emotion as it appears. There's vanity here, too, but it's the bracing kind: the belief that presence is worth more than preparation, and that a camera can catch truth only if the actor hasn't already embalmed it.