Paris in the mid-'50s was a very interesting place. It was only ten years after the Third Reich had left, and the city was awash with guns, and crime, and racketeering, and all sorts of hangovers from a very difficult time in French history. So it's an interesting time to be a policeman.

Get that right, then- if you get the quality right, then the marketability or whatever; your ability to sell videos or your ability to earn money or whatever, will follow naturally. But try to be creatively lead rather than market lead. And that's important to me.

The arts community still has a long lasting cynicism of the importance, or the artistic value, of comedy. Comedy is just farting about for money.

I'm more critical of the films I make than anyone else.

Confronting a stadium audience, you can't see the whites of their eyes. It's just an amorphous mass of noise and, of course, you can't see the alleged billions watching at home either, so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low.

Lord, thy one-liners are as good as thy tricks. Thou art indeed an all-round family entertainer.

To criticise a person for their race is a manifestly irrational and ridiculous. But to criticise their religion - that is a right. That is a freedom.