I learned how to skate, I couldn't do the tricks, but I could certainly skate fast enough. I could keep up with anybody and I could bomb hills and I could hide behind my camera.

I've been a photographer for my whole life and I've done everything with photography that I felt I could do, and I always wanted to be a filmmaker.

I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn't planned; it was realism. Over the years, the work has changed for me. I know that I have wanted to repeat myself, but I can't. I've been lost a lot of times, but then I'd just get an idea and photograph it. Once I'd started, I'd know exactly what would go down and how it would end. So I just quit doing it, because it loses all interest for me when you know what's going to happen.

I've wanted to make a film about French youth since I went to Cannes with my first film 'Kids' in 1995 ... Scribe's screenplay is about French kids today, and the world today. Just like my films 'Kids' and 'Ken Park', this will be a movie like you have never seen before.

I always felt that when I was photographing, I had a psychic need to see this, to photograph this. And I think if somebody else had been doing this work, and if I could have seen these pictures anywhere at all, then there would have been no need to make them.

The work all comes from a psychological need. See the images that I make... It's really a psychological need. I'm just jerked around by it. I'm pulled by it.

I am a storyteller. I've never been interested in just taking the single image and moving on. I always like to stay with the people I'm photographing for long periods of time.