Quotes

[press conference for My King (2015) at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival] I had made a sort of narcissistic trilogy and I wanted to turn up in a track-suit in the morning and focus solely on the actors. With each new film you want to do something different and new, so this was one of the new things I wanted to try out. Also, I wanted to have Emmanuelle [Emmanuelle Bercot] in the film. No one's irreplaceable, but I didn't know how I would make the film without her. I didn't know Vincent [Vincent Cassel], then I had a drink with him, and then I was absolutely 110 per cent sure that he was the right person. I had so many things to say about the relationship of those two people that I wanted to depict them in their life with their parents, their friends, their work, but there were so many things that I wanted to show.......the film spans ten years in the life of a couple, but you only have two hours, and Etienne [Etienne Comar] constantly encouraged me to stick to the topic because I tended to meander into other areas. The love story is something I've depicted in all my films for the past ten years. Recently a friend talked about an accident he'd had and how he'd stayed in a rehabilitation centre and that fascinated me, so I wanted to make a film about that too. As each film takes between two and four years, and time is marching on, I thought I'll make two films in one and at the same time one can focus on the things one really wants to concentrate on, and also I could jump around in time. Tony, the female character, in this way, could have a bit of hindsight in her judgement of past events.

[Cannes press conference for My King (2015)] Georgio is addicted to the woman he loves and he explains it in the film. It's just that he has a different way of being addicted, he has a different way of fighting for his couple. Men and women have the same feelings but they express them differently. It's very difficult to put everything in a film. In other words, everything that helps one to love and to continue to love - family, friends, money, work - I had to make choices. There were many more scenes of Tony who was working, defending her cases because she's a lawyer, but I had to make certain choices and in the end I decided to focus on their mutual feelings instead of meandering. The scenes where you see Tony at work, well I thought these scenes might in fact distract the spectators.

As soon as you're not happy people call you a poorly-laid hysterical woman - sexually frustrated. But when a man's not happy you don't say anything. It's normal. He's the boss. I call that ordinary misogyny.

When I'm shooting a film I don't have any libido, I don't feel like getting dressed up or making myself pretty, I forget my femininity and in fact I completely forget myself. I feed myself poorly. I dress poorly. I'm completely disconnected from my femininity, my lover's desire, of my fragility. I feel like I'm expending all of my energy looking at other people and making people believe that everything is going great even though it's not going that great.

[press conference for Polisse (2011) at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival] What really attracted me to the topic was when I saw the passion of the policemen for the job they were doing and I believe that, subconsciously, what really struck me was that it was all about children - maternity, paternity, this is a thread running through all my films - I think that's fairly subconscious. I'd like to say that when I perceived how the police protected itself from human tragedy and human disaster, when I saw how they protected themselves yet there was tremendous interaction in their own lives - that's what really attracted me. A policeman in the juvenile protection unit doesn't stay for more than ten years because the work is so hard and the juvenile protection unit is the one that's least covered by the media. People don't realise how important it is - it's the least appreciated in a sense - it's the unit with the least means. I found it amazing that the drug brigade had such media coverage and such means, yet the JPU should be the one we're most interested in because it's the unit that protects minors. In other words, a minor who commits an offence isn't really dealt with by the JPU, but they're dealt with in accordance with their offence, so you have to see what the JPU does here to protect children.