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French people are strange about America, I think.

Michel Hazanavicius

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Michel Hazanavicius
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 29
Actor
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Paris
France
Michel Hazanavičius
Strange
America
Think
Thinking
People
French

More quotes by Michel Hazanavicius

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When you look at the early-'30s movies, like King Kong, the codes of acting are very similar to those of silent movies. In some of the silent movies - the good ones, the ones done by the best directors - the acting is very, very natural
Michel Hazanavicius
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Bernard Herrmann was a genius, a great, great composer.
Michel Hazanavicius
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I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang, Tod Browning, and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don't care about the genre.
Michel Hazanavicius
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This is the problem with language, and this is what makes silent movies fun, because the connection with them, me or the audience is not with the language. There's no question of interpretation of what we are saying it's just about feeling. You create your own story
Michel Hazanavicius
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I want to thank three person: I want to thank Billy Wilder. I want to thank Billy Wilder. And I want to thank Billy Wilder.
Michel Hazanavicius
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I think Hollywood is cleverer than you think. I'm not sure they will do it. I don't think so, but maybe I'm wrong. When we were doing the preparation of the movie, we didn't have all the money so we were looking for all the solutions possible, and 3D was one option.
Michel Hazanavicius
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I watched a lot of movies from all over the world. The Russians were very good at editing. They were specialists in editing. The Man with a Camera, if you know that movie, is incredible. I still don't understand how it works. It's a movie with no script, no actors and still it works. It's really good. It's really about editing.
Michel Hazanavicius
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I guess George Clooney would be a wonderful silent actor, and Leonardo DiCaprio is such a wonderful actor he certainly could do it.
Michel Hazanavicius
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I make almost all the decisions on set and have to deal with all the financial aspects.
Michel Hazanavicius
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If you try to make a silent movie with a normal script and you just pull out the dialogue, you will have big problems with the actors because you will ask them to tell a story that you don't know.
Michel Hazanavicius
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It's not my job. The Weinstein company, it's their job to convince people. My job was to make the movie. That's what I did. I know what we did in France was to have the maximum screenings just to let people talk about the movie and say they enjoyed the movie.
Michel Hazanavicius
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I'm very happy in France making movies.
Michel Hazanavicius
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Actually, I met a lot of directors and most of them have that fantasy to make a silent movie because for directors it's the purest way to tell a story. It's about creating images that tell a story and you don't need dialogue for that.
Michel Hazanavicius
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I can say is usually people are slightly confused. They think that silent movies are old. But, the fact is, they are old because they have been made in the '20s. That's the thing that makes them old. Not the format. The format is just a format. It's not an old format.
Michel Hazanavicius
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Sometimes I think you have to try to do things that people don't think are doable. I remember at the very beginning actually, the first person I had to convince was myself really because there's a self-censorship. When everybody says 'we don't do silent movies anymore,' you agree with everybody, and you say 'yeah, you're right.' It was a fantasy.
Michel Hazanavicius
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I guess all the directors in France are influenced by Hitchcock, because he's the perfect visual director, in my eyes.
Michel Hazanavicius
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The Germans were much more graphical. The expressionism is much more than cinema. It was a movement with artists, painters, music and architecture, so it's really graphic and visual. And the French were something else.
Michel Hazanavicius
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I think there's something in common with the OSS 117 movies. The big difference is there's no irony in this one. It's not parody. I tried to make it very simple. It's a simple story, but to be simple, it's very complex in the way it's done.
Michel Hazanavicius
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But sometimes I think you have to try to do things that people don't think are doable.
Michel Hazanavicius
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All over the world there are a lot of distributors that have the equipment for 3D but they don't have the movies really. The only source of 3D movies is Hollywood. Only Hollywood sends the 3D movies. So it was an option.
Michel Hazanavicius