As an actor I've played a lot of gloomy, romantic leads and even though I might not want to recognize it, I actually really have a sense of humor.

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.

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.

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 think that what people abroad want from French film, inside French film becomes our worst fear, "Oh, another film about love!"

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.

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.