Quotes

My dream would be to make a movie with Stephen Sondheim. I'm proud that I got him to do the music for 'Stavisky'.

[on film-watching] I turn the lights low and take no calls. I like Bob Hope; I find him mysterious.

I am never driven. Every film I have made has been an assignment.

I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film.

The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn't be in flashback.

I make difficult films. But not on purpose.

[press conference for Wild Grass (2009) at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival] This is a film adapted from a novel by Christian Gailly. It was a novel that fascinated me, that bewitched me. And so I followed the course of the novel as faithfully as possible. Christian Gailly is a specialist in questions; in his books he raises questions but he never gives answers. That's what I tried to reproduce in this film. I tried to work on this idea that we are all observing ourselves, analyzing ourselves, judging ourselves, but in fact we are never aware of our real motivations, our real impulses. According to the people we encounter, our fate may be different. So there was no reason for me to invent a story in the form of a thriller because, to my mind, what constituted the charm of Christian Gailly's novel was this rather equivocal tone, this indecision.