There's a fashion, or maybe you could call it a necessity, in French cinema to make social films, which is to say films in which the characters are defined by their social context.

Paris, though it's a very famous city, it's very small, so people always tell themselves, We're gonna love each other in Paris.

I like being surrounded by students and intellectuals.

I hope each day to have done 10 seconds of good work that they can use in the film. And Im always afraid I didnt get those 10 seconds.

I knew that the principle objective of my film was to be a sentimental or an emotional study. What I did was kind of like subterfuge.

Im interested in existential films: I love movies that console you in the same way that a person consoles a weeping child.

At the end of the day you do have to write a short novel beforehand, called a script, before you can make a movie.

People always go to Paris for their honeymoon. It's like they think because the distances are closer, it's much warmer.

I think that what people abroad want from French film, inside French film becomes our worst fear, Oh, another film about love!

The separation of a childless couple is dramatic, but the separation of a couple with children is always tragic.

I think the moment I discovered I definitely wanted to act was when I saw a play alone by myself when I was fourteen. Maybe it was a Moliere play? I discovered the atmosphere of the theater, and I knew I wanted to be an actor.

Since I knew I was going to make a film that was purely about emotions, and I knew that I ran the risk of being accused of amnesia relating to the social film, to prevent this I decided it would be good to have characters who were on the margins of society. These are characters for whom love is really the only way to know that they're alive.

You can do a good movie, or you can do a good movie that can help people to feel the idea of what it is like to live. It can be good in an artificial way it can be also a good movie for your own existence. You don't know that when you do a movie. You don't know if you succeeded, which is the most difficult thing.

In France, I would like to worth with Patrice Chereau, who made Queen Margot.

Sometimes living is not so light and easy and you need a representation of life in front of you. It's a fake reorganization of reality. You start to feel, I'm not so alone in the world because I can recognize exactly the same feelings.

As an actor I've played a lot of gloomy, romantic leads and even though I might not want to recognize it, I actually really have a sense of humor.

Because if I were gay, [and] I'm not gay yet — maybe one day — but if I were gay, I'd like to see movies where homosexuality isn't always a problem.