Daily Inspiration Quote by Catherine Deneuve

Deneuve’s line lands with the elegance of a compliment and the blunt force of a dodge. “Polanski was very precise” is actor-to-director shorthand: a professional praise code that evokes rigor, taste, control. It’s the kind of thing you say when you want to sound above the fray, when you want the conversation to stay on blocking, light, and tempo rather than morality. Precision is safe; it’s aesthetic, technical, almost neutral.

The second sentence is where the quote gets quietly radioactive: “I think he still is.” The present tense is a decision. It refuses to seal Polanski in the past as a once-gifted filmmaker now eclipsed by scandal. “Still” insists on continuity - of talent, of authority, of relevance. It also performs a careful kind of loyalty: not a defense of the man, exactly, but a defense of the idea that artistry persists regardless of public judgment.

In context, that phrasing sits inside a long French cultural reflex: separating the work from the artist, treating personal transgression as something adjacent to genius rather than intertwined with it. Deneuve, an emblem of French cinema’s prestige economy, is doing what prestige often does when challenged: retreating to craft. The subtext isn’t ignorance; it’s boundary-setting. She’s signaling that her relationship to Polanski is professional, and that she’d like the court of opinion to respect that distinction - even as the world increasingly refuses to.