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.

When I was in film school I was learning more theory than practice.

I love comedies and I like sometimes comedies have a tendency to get a bit lazy. ‘The Other Guys’ was not lazy.

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.

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.

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

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.