I love silent cinema but don’t hold it sacred. Like any branch of film there are some very boring films alongside the masterpieces.
I think being a foreigner and talking about Hollywood allowed me to use some cliches and some references that an American would maybe not use.
But I don’t think of myself as a foreigner or a Frenchman! I just think of myself as a director. Whether I’m French or Australian or whatever, it’s really not important.
Hollywood is much more than America. Hollywood belongs to all of the planet.
Sometimes when an actor says something almost perfect, but you know you have to edit it, if you tell them to change something immediately, it will come out great.
I’m very happy in France making movies.
I looked at a lot of photos from Hollywood in the ’20s, photographs of silent movies being filmed all over the world which are very specific and very evocative. Berenice, the lead actress, is my wife. She really followed the same path with me.
I make almost all the decisions on set and have to deal with all the financial aspects.
French people are strange about America, I think.
But sometimes I think you have to try to do things that people don’t think are doable.
Bernard Herrmann was a genius, a great, great composer.
An idea is something you work on to make it work and a desire is much deeper in a way.
Actually, I met a lot of directors and most of them have that fantasy to make a silent movie because for directors it’s the purest way to tell a story. It’s about creating images that tell a story and you don’t need dialogue for that.
The fact that I made a special movie with an old-fashioned style – even if it’s a mix between with modern and old-fashioned things – must mean I feel both ways about change. In a way I’m resisting, but in a way adapting myself to the times.
They said ‘if you have a 3D movie, we’ll buy it’ because they want it. For maybe two weeks I really thought of a silent, black and white 3D movie and I thought it could be great. I imagined it as a very special image, a very new image, but fortunately, I didn’t have to do it.
It’s not my job. The Weinstein company, it’s their job to convince people. My job was to make the movie. That’s what I did. I know what we did in France was to have the maximum screenings just to let people talk about the movie and say they enjoyed the movie.
There are two kinds of audiences. There’s the ones who were in the theaters, and the ones who are outside and we want them to come inside the theater. And, it’s not the same.
I can say is usually people are slightly confused. They think that silent movies are old. But, the fact is, they are old because they have been made in the ’20s. That’s the thing that makes them old. Not the format. The format is just a format. It’s not an old format.
I think Hollywood is cleverer than you think. I’m not sure they will do it. I don’t think so, but maybe I’m wrong. When we were doing the preparation of the movie, we didn’t have all the money so we were looking for all the solutions possible, and 3D was one option.
All over the world there are a lot of distributors that have the equipment for 3D but they don’t have the movies really. The only source of 3D movies is Hollywood. Only Hollywood sends the 3D movies. So it was an option.
The Germans were much more graphical. The expressionism is much more than cinema. It was a movement with artists, painters, music and architecture, so it’s really graphic and visual. And the French were something else.