People are more familiar with pictures of Jacques Mesrine that had been taken of him at the end of his life, when he was doing a lot of things with the media. So there's an iconic figure that people know, and I had to eventually get there; otherwise I guess the audience would have been disappointed. My only problem is that I'm a skinny guy, and it's very hard for me to put on weight.

When you have a bunch of scripts that you have to read, the less you have, the better it is, because otherwise, everything is already planned and I think that's a terrible feeling.

The minute I started being recognised, I became much more discreet.

I have a huge relationship with Brazil; it's almost a love affair, I would say. And to me, to introduce that specific martial art like capoeira in Hollywood movies was something important to me.

La Haine - first of all, it was the story of friendship. I was very close with Mathieu Kassovitz; he was somebody I met in the nights of Paris. And the hip-hop scene and all that... You know, it was very much about doing our own thing, and some of the subject matter was so close to what we knew and the people we were hanging out with.

I'm a little angry in life.

I wear a lot of wigs as Jacques Mesrine. He'd wear multiple wigs and take them off one at a time to rob three banks in one hour.