I am a storyteller. I've never been interested in just taking the single image and moving on. I always like to stay with the people I'm photographing for long periods of time.

When I started shooting speed, amphetamine, when I was 15, almost 16, it actually calmed me down.

I've been a photographer for my whole life and I've done everything with photography that I felt I could do, and I always wanted to be a filmmaker.

I've always been interested in people that you wouldn't see otherwise. If you look back at my books, photographs, and films-and since I'm doing this retrospective I've been forced to look back-the work is always about a small group of people who are somewhat isolated, and who you would never see if I didn't film or photograph them.

If I want something I do everything to get it.

My favorite color is green.

My greatest lesson in composition was looking at paintings.

I've wanted to make a film about French youth since I went to Cannes with my first film 'Kids' in 1995 ... Scribe's screenplay is about French kids today, and the world today. Just like my films 'Kids' and 'Ken Park', this will be a movie like you have never seen before.

I always felt that when I was photographing, I had a psychic need to see this, to photograph this. And I think if somebody else had been doing this work, and if I could have seen these pictures anywhere at all, then there would have been no need to make them.

I think the reason why I never wanted to do a retrospective is because I was scared to go back and look at all this stuff through the years.

If you've seen my books through the years, I've always been a storyteller.

When I was growing up, all the films about teenagers were played by Tony Curtis or John Cassavetes when they were 27, 28 years old. We would see these teenage movies in the theaters and I would say, They don't look like they're my age at all. So I wanted to make a movie that was real and I wanted to make a movie that wasn't about me.

At the end of the day, what I show is real life. I tell the truth. And the truth can be shocking.