At the end of the day, what I show is real life. I tell the truth. And the truth can be shocking.

For me there are no rules. I think I learned that from artists-from painters and sculptors. It took photography a while to catch up to them.

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.

I think the reason why I never wanted to do a retrospective is because I was scared to go back and look at all this stuff through the years.

When I was growing up, all the films about teenagers were played by Tony Curtis or John Cassavetes when they were 27, 28 years old. We would see these teenage movies in the theaters and I would say, "They don't look like they're my age at all." So I wanted to make a movie that was real and I wanted to make a movie that wasn't about me.

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.