Paris is not so square. I'm not good at the geography of the city in Paris, so I'm always lost. Here, in New York, you can never be lost. In Paris, even when I walk to my gallery or whatever, I always take another route, because Paris is not built that way.

Paris is not so square. I'm not good at the geography of the city in Paris, so I'm always lost. Here, in New York, you can never be lost. In Paris, even when I walk to my gallery or whatever, I always take another route, because Paris is not built that way.

You have to understand that I'm a child of the second generation, which means my mother was in Auschwitz, and the aunt of my mother was in Auschwitz with her; my grandmother and grandfather died there. So yes. All of those gestures they work for you, or for them, to fill their time or not feel their anxiety. But the child feels everything. It doesn't make the child secure. You put the child in a jail.

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.

Delphine Seyrig is a very proper woman, from high society. She's from the Ferdinand de Saussure family, the structuralist. Old money. Swiss. Protestant. They were that type of well-educated people who could recognize a good artist before others, and she was like that. Even if it was against something inside her. Tell me one actress in 1972 in France, except Delphine, at her level, who would love Hôtel Monterey. No one.

The jail thing is very, very present in all of my work... Sometimes not very frontally. The jail is coming from the camps, because my mother was in the camps, and she internalized that and gave it to me.

She who seeks shall find, find all to well, and end up clouding her vision with her own preconceptions.