In fact, it is amazing how much European films - Italian, French, German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.

Movies are something people see all over the world because there is a certain need for it.

For us music is mainly part of the entertainment world and is often a luxury.

Everything is entertainment; criticism is now entertainment and it seems that the French directors have woken up one day and suddenly realised that they were not backed up any more.

I think sometimes you have to just imagine something that looks pretty impossible. By imagining something that is impossible, automatically you wish you could make it possible.

The reason I never wrote a novel is that I don't have what it takes to write characters, so they would all be talking differently. I lack that ability. If I were writing, they would all talk like me, and that's no good.

For years all I seemed to be doing was lobbying politicians and others to persuade them that European culture needed movies, and that we had to protect it.