Actually making films has taught us a lot:
It is as much trouble to make a bad films as a good one.
Our most sincere film can seem phony.
The films we do with our left hands may become worldwide hits.
A perfectly ordinary movie with energy can turn out to be better cinema than a film with “intelligent” intentions listlessly executed.
The result rarely matches the effort.
Cinematic success is not necessarily the result of good brain work, but of a harmony of existing elements in ourselves that we may not have even been conscious of: a fortunate fusion of subject and our deeper feelings, an accidental coincidence of our own preoccupations at a certain moment of life and the public’s.

—François Truffaut