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.

Of course, when you work with actors and when you work on a script everything that you know about the human experience can't possibly go in.

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.

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

If you are not a New Yorker, when you arrive there for the first time you have the impression you grew up there because you've seen it in so many films. It's been filmed from every single angle and by so many different filmmakers that you know the streets, the sidewalks, the architecture, the cabs, the temper of the people.

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

When you make a film, you come to say something.