I have learned that acting is not about beauty.

I'm an actor, that's what I do every day. Dressing up is part of my job. But whatever you wear you should always be yourself: never go totally with the fashion but use what there is available to be an individual.

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.

If the guy behind the camera is not good, the pictures are bad. It's still you, and it's the same lines and everything, but it doesn't work.

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 have a tendency to think that that stereotype of American movies and Hollywood movies doesn't exist. Of course you have the studios that have a very hard policy upon their artists, but then I haven't really been doing any real Hollywood movie yet.

People pretend to be nice, people pretend to be smooth, and polite and everything, but this is only an appearance, because the way we're built as human beings is only in paradox and contradictions.