The notion, the invention of a country, is fairly new in the history of mankind. We tend to forget that. We want to protect our country. The country is something that's fairly new. It's 250 years old, maybe 300 years old, so it's bound to change and evolve also. Migration is part of that.

I think it's the same thing for a country. We are lucky then that we can get some financing from the government, because it means when I get the money, when I get the grant to do the film, of course it's based on the script, but I have total artistic control and I can do personal stuff.

Even if I knew that Separation would probably win, when they announced the film, I was thinking to myself "Oh! I want this! I want this!" And so, when we didn't win, I got depressed for about 20 minutes, and then I snapped out of it and enjoyed the rest of the evening.

I teach myself archaeology, I teach myself Spanish, and that's because it can be fun, it can be useful. So I keep studying. I read books because I still want to study. I don't want to stop.

If you look at the Oscars and look at the Best Foreign Language series, you see that the films are coming from everywhere - from Quebec, Israel, Poland, and Belgium. It's not the usual French, German, etc. This category is opening up to socially engaged and political films. I think we're going to see a cross over to the main categories also. It's part of this global environment now and I'm grateful that the Academy is having this window on world cinema.

If youre writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.

My film is actually very critical of the level of French we're using back home. To have an immigrant from an ancient French colony come and do that is a little critical of our education system back home. Balzac is definitely over their heads. It's meant to be funny also because it would be also probably too much for kids in France, but kids in France would know who Balzac is. But, back home at that age, I guarantee you they don't know who he is.