I had good parents. Nothing terrible happened. But I had the feeling that they kind of protected me from reality somehow.

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.

It seems to me that [my films] are talking about very simple and, I hope, universal feelings. And at the same time, even though they are set in a very weird world with elements that are irrational, at the same time, it's very close to an ordinary world. And I like to have this third feeling of mystery.

I try to simplify things for the children.

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

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.