I’ve dreamed a lot, but i’m not a very good sleeper.
I don’t want to compare myself to him – I don’t want people to see me as this great genius – but when I see Charlie Chaplin’s movies there is a combination of drama, naivety and social meaning that I can see in myself, at a different level.
When people are very original, sometimes they are original as a way to resist the mainstream.
The idea that competition is pointless is really something that speaks to me, especially in America where competition is really prominent and very overwhelming, and it doesn’t bring the best out in you because what’s going to push you is to bring others down.
I learned to drive when I was 35. I’m driving like an old lady and very close to the wheel. I don’t take many risks, and when people yell at me I say ‘sorry, sorry, sorry!’ I don’t have road rage yet.
I had a lot of encouragement and tolerance from my parents, but I also have many friends who didn’t get that from their parents and in a way they have more strength from spending years where nobody believed in them.
I’m always excited to work with actors.
Perhaps my favourite story is ‘Le Passe-Muraille’ by Marcel Ayme. It’s about a guy who wakes up with a weird faculty that means he can walk through walls. He’s a very shy clerk, and he uses it to get revenge, or vent his frustration.
I think it’s a problem when journalists have the title of their article before they do the interview, because it biases the way they conduct it.
It’s very hard to say I’m surrealist. It’s like saying I’m poetic. It’s not something you want necessarily to be aware of.
My father had a Super 8 camera when I was a kid and sometimes he would use it. I did some animation with it. I did a lot of flipbooks.
I want to explore new ideas and put myself in a place where I can finish a project that is more unusual or that doesn’t seem doable.
Since I was a kid, I’ve liked to see how things are done. Sometimes when you see how things are done, it’s like watching a ‘making of’ within the story. You see the physical aspect, the construction of things.
I want to see abstract art move. Especially in the ’30s, you had animators doing innovative work, and I was entranced by that. It’s basically what you see when you close your eyes, when you fall asleep.
My goal was to show that even if people work in a garage or a supermarket, they have very funny things to say. We never hear their voices.
There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don’t really understand it until the film is finished.
Sometimes, when people use too much blue screen in movies, the actors don’t look credible, because they have their own opinion of what the thing will look like, and each person has a different opinion.
I read about some movie where they did everything on blue screen, and the actors were not even connecting to each other.
I’m not against the technology at all, I just don’t like to use it if it’s just to mimic what you can do with traditional methods.
It’s part of my job to maintain the emotional reality and the naturalism even when the atmosphere is contrived.