When I shoot actors, I have that dilemma. I want the actor to be good, and sometimes I have to push them to a place that isn't pleasant. I always think: 'Is it worth doing for the sake of the movie?' But I have to remember the bigger picture.

When I saw The Matrix and other movies of this type, I wished I had been given the opportunity to express myself with all this technology and do something sort of big in scale, but the right material never really came my way.

If you're not grown up enough to understand that a trailer is not done by the director, then fine. Judge the movie from the trailer.

The idea that competition is pointless is really something that speaks to me, especially in America where competition is really prominent and very overwhelming, and it doesn't bring the best out in you because what's going to push you is to bring others down.

I have a video store next to my apartment in Paris, and they still have most of their videos on VHS. A lot of people think Be Kind Rewind is set in the past because they just wipe this reality out of their head, but it is true that there are a lot of movies that don't exist on DVD. But I'm not like a big movie buff.

I find, surprisingly, that actors are liberated in their work if there's stuff going on around them, because they can't think too much about who they're supposed to be.

I think the purpose of test screenings is different for the studio and for the filmmaker. For the studio, I think they want to know whether the film works or not.