Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys.
In this film, we took a helicopter up and showed London as a vista, which is not very often done.
I've always dreamed that George Lucas would call me one day and ask me to be in one of the 'Star Wars' films.
I loved films of the '70s with those antihero protagonists who you don't know if you can get behind because their behavior is really questionable.
I mean they're making remakes of my films and I'm not even dead yet! Why would you want to make a remake?
As you know, in America there's no rights for the artist, so whatever films I've made kind of belong to the studio, so if they want to remake it they can.
I'm more embarrassed about some of the films that I've been in than I am about Playboy. Playboy I'm actually quite proud of.
Every film is its own experience, its own planet, its own family. It seems infinite when you're working on it, and then it's suddenly very finite, and it's done.
When I worked on 2001 - which was my first feature film - I was deeply and permanently affected by the notion that a movie could be like a first-person experience.
It's hard to make a living at independent films, at least in my experience. It can be hard to be really creatively fulfilled in some television. Between the two, I get a bit of both.
That's one of the benefits of working on big budget films. You work with people who have a lot of experience and you get to learn a lot.
I hooked up with director Jacques Audiard for this film called 'Rust & Bone' with Marion Cotillard. I loved that experience so much I'm truly sad that it's over!
For the first few years we lived in a tiny rented cottage at the bottom of a friend's garden. We often joked that there was plenty of film in the fridge, but not too much food!
The necessity to conceptualise has to come very early on, and defining a vector of development for that film also at the beginning of the process will allow you much more freedom as you go along.
I now have two different audiences. There's the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years, and the American family audience. American jokes, less fighting.
I don't like the outside world to intrude when I'm making a film. I like to either see my family or work, but I don't like to go out.
I always find that really interesting, you know, when I get to see characters that I love in TV and film and theater around their family.
In the film business, when you're young, you just want to work. But when you're older, it has more to do with who's involved with the project - who you're going to get in the boat with.
When I got into the film business, my aim was to adopt a positive persona, of a guy who fights against injustice. And it saved me, because my acting was atrocious to say the least!
I wanted to become an engineer, or get a masters in business. But I had the opportunity to do films when I was about 25 and it was a great way to express myself.
I did not grow up a cinefile. No one in my family was in the film business or even anything close to it.
