When I was a child, I had a quiet, protected childhood.

I am very much interested in fairy tales. I guess that most of the films I like to do have this kind of aspect.

I'm very interested in talking about children in this moment where you are going to become a teenager, and I think it's very relevant to use a fairy tale to talk about that.

I try to simplify things for the children. For instance, [I arrange] for them to have almost no dialogue, or to somehow give them very precise indications, because usually they ask for that.

What is very exciting with children is they like to play, and they don't care so much about the meanings [of things], and they are just excited to have weird scenes to do or weird things to do, like playing deaf, or playing sick, or swimming in the water.

The film from the beginning is not the real world; it's an imaginary world. And this imaginary world is both inside and outside the normal world.

I used to live in a little city by the sea, and the feeling of isolation - it was not like living in Paris or London. It was a bit apart from the main city, and [it gave me] this feeling of isolation and also being close to nature, with nature as a surrounding and also a frontier, from the society of the world.