French cinema audiences usually don't express anything. Certainly not satisfaction.

I chose the American ones, more or less the last five years of the silent era, because those are the ones that aged the best in the way they tell the story. One, it's about human beings with context. It's a very classical story with feelings, with laughter, melodrama and it really works, the good ones - Murnau's American movies, John Ford's Four Sons, King Vidor's The Crowd, or the (Josef) von Sternberg movies. You can watch it now and it still works. I mean they are really, really good pieces so this is where I tried to work.

People inside the theaters usually, not 100 percent but most of them, enjoy the movie. Usually they come with a small negative view. In a way, they're prepared to get bored because it's silent and because it's black and white. So they are much more pleased to be entertained in a way. They're very happy when they go out. This was my job. For the other ones, I can do nothing except screen the movie and hope that they will say to their friends that it's not so [bad].

French people are strange about America, I think.

I watched a lot of movies from all over the world. The Russians were very good at editing. They were specialists in editing. The Man with a Camera, if you know that movie, is incredible. I still don't understand how it works. It's a movie with no script, no actors and still it works. It's really good. It's really about editing.

There are two kinds of audiences. There's the ones who were in the theaters, and the ones who are outside and we want them to come inside the theater. And, it's not the same.

I looked at a lot of photos from Hollywood in the '20s, photographs of silent movies being filmed all over the world which are very specific and very evocative. Berenice, the lead actress, is my wife. She really followed the same path with me.