interview

I read that you were sneaked into King Kong as a kid?
Where did you read that?

In an interview in Face to Face.
Yes, that's true. I was dressed up by my parents. When I was 12 years old I became fascinated by Vampire and horror movies and my parents and my sister recognised. When King Kong came to our town in the suburbs of Paris I was too young to see it. So my sister who was a 20 year art student and my mentor dressed me up to look older with the help of my mother. Anyway, we managed to get in to the cinema but when the opening credits began to roll the police came in to check up and they found me. Even though I looked a little older than my age, they argued with my mother about my age but because I had no proof they told me I had to leave. I was terribly disappointed and frustrated at missing the film. That frustration as a 13 year old made me want to lay my hands on as many horror films I could find. I saw all the B-movies, all the Hammer horrors, all the Dracula films that I could see, and that was a lot of films, I became a film fan through this path. Then my sister took me to the Franch Cinemateque. This is where I discovered the 'family of cinema', its totally free of boundaries or frontiers and people were there from all over the world. In the 70's it looked like an Aztec temple with huge pillars, an enormous screen and all built in the concrete, fascist style of the time but for us it was monumental. I discovered film there and must have watched thousands of films from the birth of cinema and from all over the world.

Did you go to UCLA from there?
No, I started to direct my own short films and bought my friend's father's 8mm camera at 13, this was before the Super-8 came out. I made Dracula pictures with myself as Dracula, shooting when I wasn't starring. Then I started to make some short surrealist films in the Bunuel style with my best friend Louis Becker, the grandson of the pioneer Jacques Becker. Then I decided to America to study film because you needed a scientific baccalaureate to attend the very technical French film schools, I only had an art and a philosophical background and I was hopeless at maths and physics. I went to Los Angeles, then San Francisco for a short time and then my girlfriend at the time invited me to see New York before I started at UCLA. So I arrived in New York in a midnight snow-storm in the winter of '77/'78. New York just blew my mind like a character, like a great lady almost or like a modern art sculpture. The city was blanketed in snow and when I awoke in the morning there were people skiing down 5^th Avenue, it was an incredible time to be there and there was no way I could leave or study or do anything anywhere else in the world except New York. So I stayed there and studied and met some people.

Which is where Scorcese went.
Yes, his teacher taught me, lovely man and a great teacher. He was someone that transmitted the passion of filmmaking and cinema, which is the most important thing for a student.

Were you always going to be a cinematographer?
No, I wanted to direct first. Little by little I realised that what I liked most about film was to create a mood for a story but not actually tell the story.