It was like a dream to me to suddenly get into the market with that kind of movie, like La Haine. It actually created my identity as an actor, that thing.

I think American audiences like gangster movies. It's part of the culture.

When you see violence in movies in general, it's very quick and painless, which isn't what it's like.

The idea of telling a story in reverse destabilises your ordinary moral reactions. That's one of the points of art - to challenge your preconceptions.

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.

When somebody is talking to you about something terrible on set with lines, and you believe what he says, sometimes it gives a strange vibe, because you wonder when that person is talking if he's talking about something that really happened to him and he's using the character.

Neither of us are workaholics. I think the key thing is to accept that if you only exist through what you do, then you become what you do, and this is very wrong.