Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was thinking of going to London drama schools or to New York, because France didn't accommodate the things I wanted to do in film.
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.
I love French style from the Thirties and Forties. French movie stars like Jean Gabin and Yves Montand had so much natural, effortless style.
The first important movie that I did, I shaved my head for the movie. When the hair grew back, I had white hair for the first time in my life.
I work everywhere. If there is a nice adventure in South Korea, for example, why not? Russia, Brazil, whatever. I'm ready for almost anything.
I think life is short, and you can't spend time doing things just to be on set to reassure yourself that people are not going to forget about you.
The idea of telling a story in reverse destabilises your ordinary moral reactions. That's one of the points of art - to challenge your preconceptions.
Coming from Paris, I'd really like to live in Rio. I think it's gotten better. It's not as violent. The economy is better. The middle class is rising.
Cronenberg's a lot of fun, and that a lot of people don't know watching his movies. He doesn't take himself seriously. He's still reinventing himself.
The relationship I have to everyday life is very European. We have a different relationship with religion, with faith, with nudity, with sex, with food.
French men can be very tough too, you know... Real bad boys move in silence, as we know, so you don't have to be loud and muscular to be scary, actually.
It was like a dream to me to suddenly get into the market with that kind of movie, like La Haine. It actually created my identity as an actor, that thing.
Acting is such a feminine process: you have to become the desire of others. I'm OK with this, and so is Gerard Depardieu. In many ways, he's very feminine.
Neither of us are workaholics. I think the key thing is to accept that if you only exist through what you do, then you become what you do, and this is very wrong.
I didn't have many girlfriends in my youth. I was an active young man, jumping from one girl to the next, but never with anyone for more than three or four months.
I wanted to be an actor to act, and now, being an actor, you have to dress up, you have to be nice, you have to be smart, you have to be sexy, you have to be ready.
I'm more attracted to the bad guys. Why? Because in real life, I don't know any good guys. I know okay guys. I know polite guys. I know people who can control themselves.
People ask me where I live most of the time, and it's kind of complicated for me to answer, because I'm not really sure. It's somewhere in between London, Rome, Paris, and Rio.
I really like romantic comedies and light movies and everything but I think - I don't know where it comes from - but when you're doing violent movies, you're closer to reality.
I'm really proud of 'Oceans 12.' Of course, you do an 'Oceans' movie, you get known all over the world. It's an incredibly powerful medium: It's a Hollywood-identified blockbuster.
When you have a bunch of scripts that you have to read, the less you have, the better it is, because otherwise, everything is already planned and I think that's a terrible feeling.
What came out of 'Ocean's Twelve' is actually great because you do one 'Ocean's Twelve,' and you're more known around the world than if you did 20 years in the French cinema industry.
Many times, I have heard people saying that they don't like to work with their wife or husband, but to me, it is a plus. To work with somebody you love makes filming faster, more fun.
Female influence came from my grandmother and my aunt. They would sing Corsican love songs while cleaning the house and dress all in black and say melodramatic things like: 'I want to die.'
I was much more interested by clothes when I was younger. I'm about being discreet. What they call the French touch, whatever that means. Low profile and somehow elegant without being flashy.
If I have to pretend to be anything else than French, then I know it's work for me. It's not that it scares me, but it's work. I cannot just pop up on the set and say 'Okay, today I'm Italian!'
I ran away from three different boarding schools before joining a circus school, and eventually I became an actor. The only thing I learned at boarding school was never to send my child to one.
Instead of playing heroes and righteous people, I'd rather portray characters with problems of conscience who have to lie, to betray, and then have to cope with that. They feel more true to me.
I have a huge relationship with Brazil; it's almost a love affair, I would say. And to me, to introduce that specific martial art like capoeira in Hollywood movies was something important to me.
My problem is I can't show any of my movies to my daughters. It's tough. 'Beauty and the Beast'... they liked it. But that's the only one, really. Otherwise, they've always been dark or violent.
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.
I did direct two short movies. I learned many things, and one of the things I learned was that I am not a director. It has to be visceral, and it's not for me. I feel much more comfortable acting.
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.
To me, Sheitan movie is the answer to all the problems we have in France concerning immigration. That is a fake problem; people can actually work together and do something very interesting out of it.
There is this idea that its very different from the French point of view to work in America blah, blah, blah. But I think its different from one person to the other, not from one country to the other.
I feel like the so-called bad guys are never totally bad. I guess it's the closest thing I can do to reality: people act nice but nobody really is nice. We all have to balance that with something dark.
There is this idea that it's very different from the French point of view to work in America blah, blah, blah. But I think it's different from one person to the other, not from one country to the other.
I'm moving to Rio permanently with my family. It's one of the places left in the world where people still live with a big charge of poetry on a daily basis. I feel we've kind of lost that here in Europe.
I guess I look strange a bit. Strange but confident. I'm not like a model or anything. I always compare this to wearing a hat. You can wear the strangest hat, but if you think it's cool, then you'll look cool.
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.
As a younger actor, I had delusions. I would dream of Scorsese and De Niro; I would meet people, and it would be like this, and it would change moviemaking in France, and Paris would become the center of the world.
I don't think France is a racist country, I really don't, but we do still have many problems with our immigrant past, and there's a shame that goes with that, that works both ways, in the host and in the post-immigrant generation.
Women? I'm still working on the subject. I haven't finished my studies. I would say I'm so happy that they're around. This is the salt and pepper of life. This is what makes me wake up in the morning - even more than work, really.
The few times in my life where I had four or five movies in a row, it was a nightmare. I felt trapped. I felt like my life was planned for a year and a half or two years, and it was terrible. Most of the time, everything collapsed.
Soderbergh is a very respectable director that manages to have an incredible amount of freedom in a system that doesn't allow anybody to be free as he is on a set. And he will jump from 'Solaris' to 'Ocean's Twelve' and 'Thirteen.'
I think it's much harder to have a long dialogue scene than an action scene. An action scene is long, but it's not really hard. It's kind of boring, really. It looks good at the end, but to shoot it, it's not the most exciting thing.
The minute your parents die, you stop fighting them. I realized the more I changed my face for films, the more I looked like him. I always liked to disguise myself because I was trying to run away from his image. But all that is not worth it.
I still wear my trousers baggy as I did in my teens. But in a different way. I've loved trainers since my youth - limited edition, vintage, whatever. You could recognise people and judge their character through their trainers. I'm a Nike man.
All good actors are actresses. The more like a woman they are, the better they act, because a man's salvation is his femininity. Women have stronger sensibilities than men, which allows them to go a bit deeper when they are on and off the stage.
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.