I just wanted to make a properly good movie, and not beg for the love of the fans.

Directing is like cooking, it's like cuisine. You cannot make a great dish with bad ingredients. I have great actors, and I'm putting them together. That's all I'm doing.

Whats great about The Avengers is that its the next step. Its not just superhero fights super-villain and superhero wins. Its about superheroes that come together and interact. Its a clash of the egos. You could do Avengers 1 without a villain, just with all these guys coming together. They could sit down and just have a discussion.

It’s funny, I started by making fake American movies, The Transporter and stuff like that. I was shooting in France, but everything was in English. But then afterwards, I was looking at real French movies like the Jacques Audiard movies.

French cinema has always been very interesting, and it's still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it's great to still have a cinema that doesn't try to emulate, for example, American cinema.

Great actors are so easy to direct. It's like they're big 747s that you just have to move left and right, and I don't really need to direct. I need to put them in the right costume, with the right haircut, in the right location, and with the right actor to act with.

I just wanted to make a properly good movie, and not beg for the love of the fans.