All day my mind drifts off into fantasies and little stupid jokes.

When you make something you like and audiences reject it, the experience can be painful. But I've discovered...that when you make something you aren't exactly satisfied with, and someone tells you it's great, that's even mor...e painful and frustrating.

In Hollywood everything is formatted, everything is compulsory, so therefore we have to follow the law of benefits and profit and money, let us say the law of Hollywood.

I'm very slow, and I do everything myself. I remember I spent three days to change the size of something I had sketched because I felt it was too small.

I think we're entering a new period of filmmaking that's analogous to switching from black-and-white to color, or from silent to sound. The medium is completely flexible, and it's not bound by anything. If you imagine something, you can do it.

If I would want to have a huge audience, I would make American movies, not French movies, because there is a limit of course with French language. If I prefer to shoot in my own language, it is to play with my language, to play in my Paris, and I have complete freedom in France. It's so amazing. If American directors could imagine how free I am, they would have asked for political asylum immediately.

I like the cinema of people like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton. I am not keen on trying to reproduce reality - for that you should do documentaries.