Any advice I could give to female directors would be the same as for males: There will be endless difficulties, some seemingly defeating, on your way. That's a given. Just wipe out the very notion of stress. Concentrate on your actors. Obsess about your story and the world it is anchored in. Deal with the hundreds of down-to-earth issues [around] the existence of your film. At some point, everything will be ripe. And you wouldn't be able to stop your film from coming to life even if you wanted to.

The foreign-language Oscar is something that doesn't go to the producer or the director; it goes to the country.

Making a film transforms your relationship to the world. And there's some sort of natural authority that builds up along the way.

I didn't want to do casting in a way that you find yourself in a situation where there's this perfect girl for a part and you just can't cast her because the family says no.

With a screenwriter and with the actors there is always an environment of trust. You can say anything, all your secrets, and you know that it won't get out of that room.

There's something about all the people who are on a mission for purity and chastity, which I find very questionable.

It wouldn't have existed without France, and it's a French initiative. As a filmmaker, I owe everything to France - I got accepted at a French film school that takes six directors a year. Once you're in, you make films under the eye of people in the industry. You grow up in front of their eyes.