Quotes

[press conference for The Unknown (2026) at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival] The starting point was the idea of my brother's graphic novel and it showed in a very simple manner this loss which builds up as the story unfolds. The idea was to unfold all these different possibilities in a moment of total vertigo. Indeed, there's something which runs through the film and invades the urban space as if everything was destined. This is something that really strikes me and when you have children it's visible day by day. You see them growing up, and growing up, it's as if certain layers disappear but are retained in one's memory and that's something which is both beautiful and melancholy at the same time. The film also enabled me to embrace the question of time. Being is a way of starting to disappear.

[Cannes press conference for The Unknown (2026)] While I was adapting the novel, I thought that you need to find the real identities of these new bodies and I realised I had to change the title. So I ended up with a title, The Unknown - it's the title of a film I love in English, The Unknown (1927), which translates as L'Inconnu, by Tod Browning - it's a silent film which is quite magnificent. In French, I added the "e" at the end to denote the fact that the unknown was a woman. I didn't call it this as a reference to the earlier film, but I felt that the storyline, as it unfolds, consisted of moving towards to the unknown, an unknown woman, which is something that remains unresolved up until the end in the film. And so I thought the title was quite apt.