There's a fashion, or maybe you could call it a necessity, in French cinema to make social films, which is to say films in which the characters are defined by their social context.

Sometimes living is not so light and easy and you need a representation of life in front of you. It's a fake reorganization of reality. You start to feel, "I'm not so alone in the world because I can recognize exactly the same feelings."

You can do a good movie, or you can do a good movie that can help people to feel the idea of what it is like to live. It can be good in an artificial way; it can be also a good movie for your own existence. You don't know that when you do a movie. You don't know if you succeeded, which is the most difficult thing.

Because if I were gay, [and] I'm not gay yet — maybe one day — but if I were gay, I'd like to see movies where homosexuality isn't always a problem.

I knew that the principle objective of my film was to be a sentimental or an emotional study. What I did was kind of like subterfuge.

Because I'm Parisian, I wanted to show a Paris that I don't see at the movies, so I spent a lot of time looking for places that have never been filmed, for streets that have never been filmed because there's a thing about Paris, where it's kind of like a charming music box, this luminous cocoon, like those things that have fake snow in them that you turn upside down.

I think the moment I discovered I definitely wanted to act was when I saw a play alone by myself when I was fourteen. Maybe it was a Moliere play? I discovered the atmosphere of the theater, and I knew I wanted to be an actor.