Each time I had an internship to do or an essay to write, I would always do it in the field of cinema. Nobody in my family worked in film and nobody could understand it.

That's the luck we have with making films in Europe. It's still, in some ways, a virgin territory for a lot of stories. It's funny to see people in 10-gallon hats somewhere in France or Switzerland. You think, "Wow, is this real?" You do it in Wyoming and it's redundant.

When someone offers me a job or a project, I always ask myself, "What does it tell me about the world?" and "Have I seen it before?" Two good questions.

People who work in distribution will be distributors all their life.

When you're a screenwriter, it's like being a mechanic. You open the hood of the story, the director is the driver, and he says, "What do you think? It's a little tough."

The great thing about Europe is that things have not been represented [as much]. If you open the door of a bar in Brooklyn in a film you know exactly who is the mobster, who is the nice guy, who is the drunk, who's the waitress, who's the lonely heart. If you push open the door to a bar in Antwerp or Lisbon or Rotterdam, people will talk five different languages. You don't know who's who. You don't know if that guy is a banker or a mobster.

I wanted to direct when I was very young. I had no idea of cinema, of who's doing what. That was my first instinct: "Okay, I want to be the boss."