I'm Jewish. That's all. So I am in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.

What I hate in movies is all those people you need. And then I realize I do better when I shoot by myself.

My father said, "Okay, enough with the Jewish school." He put me into a public school and he said, "If you are the first one in your class, that means the school is bad." That was his humor.

First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what. All the kids, all the girls they had already seen that and knew that from their family, and I would say, "What are you talking about, what's that?" It's not my world. My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible.

When I'm in my neighborhood, I don't see anything anymore, because I'm so used to it. When I go somewhere else, suddenly, I'm alive. I'm on alert, and I can be fresh.

What I think is dreadful about art is the way it's related to the money afterward. Not when you do it... But after that, it's like 5,000 rich people have access to it. A movie, even though it can be a bad movie or a good movie, it is more democratic. The people who buy my films, the people who buy my installations it's sometimes a foundation or a museum. When it's a foundation, it's related to very, very, very rich people - who are your enemies! Your enemies are feeding you. But you're not meeting them. So it's a very strange thing.

I went at 4:30 in the morning to a café 500 meters from my place. And it was another city... Totally different than where I go every day. And I said, "God, I will do that again." That's another subject I want to do. It's my street, suddenly different at 5:00 in the morning. I can shoot for one week. That's enough to make a movie.