Biography

Son of a French mother and a German father.

Studied directing at the City University in New York.

Teaches at La Fémis (France's national film school).

Three daughters.

Former student at L'IDHEC (La FEMIS).

I consider myself a French filmmaker. As a person, I consider myself French-German - half half - but as a filmmaker I'm French, because I've done all of my films in France or in the French production system. I'm completely part of it.

My main influence was - and in a way still is - Alfred Hitchcock. He was very important to me in the sense that I was triggered by what he said in the interview book "Hitchcock - Truffaut: The Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by François Truffaut" [1984]. Before that, filmmaking felt very complicated to me. I began reading Cahiers du Cinéma and I didn't understand anything; it seemed very abstract, philosophical, and too complex. But when I read the book, I found all the answers to the questions that you have to ask yourself if you want to make a film - very practical questions, and not theoretical questions. Like why use a close-up here or a tracking shot there, and what effect will it have on the audience, or why is it better to film villains from far rather than close because they are more threatening. All those questions and answers in those interviews seemed very down-to-earth and practical. The book took away all the fear that I might have had plunging into that world of filmmaking.

[on The Night of the 12th (2022)] I read the back cover of 18.3, Une Année à la PJ (18.3, A Year with the French Judicial Police) (2020), the book by Pauline Guéna. She explains that in the Judicial Police, each investigator has a case or a crime that haunts them and which they can't let go of. This isn't a story in itself, but it did arouse my curiosity. So, I read the book, which tells of the author's time embedded with the Versailles Judicial Police force in 2016. I couldn't see a film in it and I also thought that there'd already been so many series covering that particular ground, right up until the final two chapters covering the investigation which features in The Night of the 12th: Clara's murder and investigator Yohann who was and still is obsessed with this case because it hasn't been solved. With Gilles Marchand, my co-screenwriter, we concentrated on the last three chapters of the book, which mention an investigation in which the murderer was never found. What I really liked was that we don't find out who did it, because it's an angle that we don't often see, except in Zodiac (2007) and Memories of Murder (2003). This ended up being a cold case, and it's this nonresolution that interested me. In crime thrillers, the criminals generally end up being brought in handcuffed and it's what the audience expects. Here the focus is turned elsewhere: towards the investigator's work and the violence that they face every day.

[on The Night of the 12th (2022)] I have a problem with a lot of Tarantino's violent scenes, because I feel he's just having fun. Hitchcock helped me because he is very good at conveying violence without showing it. So we had those tight closeups when she meets the killer, on the lighter, on her eyes, then suddenly to have the very wide shot - unspectacular in a sense - of her crossing the frame as a small burning figure. All those things come from studying Hitchcock and his film language.

[press conference for Case 137 (2025) at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival] The Night of the 12th (2022) dealt with the criminal brigade of the police. That perhaps made me continue to want to continue looking at the police as an institution and how it works. With thrillers and police enquiries, you follow certain rules in terms of suspense, but you can also touch on other things. In The Night of the 12th it was violence against women. In this case, it's police violence during normal policing, unlike The Night of the 12th. There is a police inquiry conducted by the police unit that investigates the police, so I felt there was a lot of scope for fiction because it was policemen conducting an inquiry about other policemen. What I try to do is to understand the functioning of the police. Why the yellow vests? It's because we're talking about 2018 and 2019 - it's not such a long time ago but it seems to have taken place in the distant past because we've since had the Covid epidemic. The powers-that-be were deeply disturbed by the yellow vest movement, it led to very strong reactions on the part of the police and it highlighted the fractures and divides in French society. Particularly central Paris and the outlying areas or small villages in the provinces....there you have people who feel they're invisible and no one takes an interest in them. So the film was fairly symptomatic of this kind of situation. The events took place some time ago but the same divides, the same fractures still exist. We therefore felt it would be a good means to talk about these divides. The yellow vests are now part of French history. I therefore feel it was important to tackle such matters.