French People Are Strange About America, I

I Chose The American Ones, More Or Less The Last Five Years Of The Silent Era, Because Those Are The Ones That Aged The Best In The Way They Tell The Story. One, It's About Human Beings With Context. It's A Very Classical Story With Feelings, With Laughter, Melodrama And It Really Works, The Good Ones - Murnau's American Movies, John Ford's Four Sons, King Vidor's The Crowd, Or The (josef) Von Sternberg Movies. You Can Watch It Now And It Still Works. I Mean They Are Really, Really Good Pieces So This Is Where I Tried To Work.

I Am Unusual For A Frenchman - I Have Absolutely Nothing Against The United States.

I'm Very Happy In France Making Movies.

I Watched A Lot Of Silent Directors Who Were Absolutely Great Like John Ford And Fritz Lang, Tod Browning, And Also Some Very Modern Directors Like The Coen Brothers. The Directors Take The Freedom Within Their Own Movies To Be Melodramatic Or Funny When They Chose To Be. They Do Whatever They Want And They Don't Care About The Genre.

Usually, When You Do A Period Movie, You Just Recreate What You Are Shooting. You Don't Recreate The Way You Shoot It. I Think I Did The Same Thing Here As I Did In The Oss 117 Movies. I Recreated The Way To Shoot That Period, Because To Me, Like What I Was Saying About The Steadicam, There's No Sense To Do A Steadicam Shot In The 1920s Because You Have Never Seen The '20s Like That. You Can't Believe There Was A Steadicam In The 1920s. I Believe It's A Continuation Of The Oss 117 In A Way But Without The Irony.