Q: It [the mention of Juliette Binoche in In Praise of Love] reminds me of the scene in Sauve qui pent (la vie) when Dutronc announces to his students that Marguerite Duras is in the next room, but we never see her.

JLG: In fact, she really was there, but she did not want to be filmed-perhaps because of her taste for voiceover in her own films. She came in order to be offscreen [laughs]. --"Hope Springs Eternal," Jan/Feb 2002.

"While Ozu was making this film he received an induction notice from the Japanese Imperial Army. "Though I tried to finish it in a hurry, I didn't have time. Torajiro Saito (a director friend of Ozu's) had to direct the last few scenes for me. When I finally saw it, I didn't have the feeling that it was mine- and though it was my first film I only saw it that once." --Donald Richie, "Yasujiro Ozu: A Biographical Filmography," Spring 1971

"Ozu had a weakness for such films, which he could not handle and never learned. He later made several such melodramas, all of them undistinguished...He later remembered that he had tried particularly hard with Beauty's Sorrow and that it hadn't worked. He also remembered that he had not tried at all with young miss and had made a successful picture. Concerning his next he wrote that "having learned my lesson from Beauty's Sorrow, I made this picture in my best easy-going manner, and it worked." --Donald Richie, "Yasujiro Ozu: a Biographical Filmography," Spring 1971