My mom read French 'Elle' when I was a little girl, and so, when I was 15 or 16, I said, 'I want to work in fashion.'
I can't impress people with the pedigree of obscure French filmmakers that got me into film. It was Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg. I really thought I wanted to make dumb action movies.
In movies, there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It's a quiet, difficult undertaking, requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.
The stubby French painter Toulouse-Lautrec supposedly invented chocolate mousse - I find that rather hard to believe, but there you have it.
I have a very nice garden and extraordinary markets, where there are products from the earth and the sea, in the French Basque country.
French is, in many ways, more difficult for an English-speaking person to sing. It is so full of complex and trying vowels. It requires the utmost subtlety.
I did a little film called 'Nina,' a small role. I played a French girl who was a nurse to Nina Simone. Zoe Saldana plays Nina.
The French are very bizarre. There is this collective depiction: 'We're in decline, we're being assailed, we must protect ourselves.'
I am half Scottish. My father is an expat from Glasgow, and on my mother's side there's a bit of French, a bit of Scottish, a bit of Irish.
Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn't been translated into Spanish.
The difference between the extras here and in France is the French extras read books. Actually, they hide the book and pretend that they're acting. Here, you can see everybody wants his break.
The English Patient' is about the coming together of a French-Canadian nurse, an English patient, a Sikh in a turban and me, Caravaggio, and each of us is seeking a resolution to our own problems.
Many French directors, having now realised there was no more real criticism, that the standards of the past have gone, are very offended about the quality of film criticism.
Everything is entertainment; criticism is now entertainment and it seems that the French directors have woken up one day and suddenly realised that they were not backed up any more.
German and English firms operate internationally, while French firms do not. The only place where they all have work is in China. Anybody can sell himself in China!
I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.
I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.
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.
Tom Ford once told me that he found French women sexier than American ones. He said, 'Americans are too clean...' I took no offense.
I'm as frustrated with the French, I think, as anyone, but look, there's going to be other challenges and there are going to be other issues. As long as there's a war on terrorism going on, we're all going to have to work together.
The extraordinary exertions of the colonies, in cooperation with British measures, against the French, in the late war, were acknowledged by the British parliament to be more than adequate to their ability.
