Today's cinema is a global art form, it is impossible to make movies for a market the size of France, representing no more than 4% of the world's total.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The French have got to understand that a film is so expensive that it can no longer afford to be regional or even national in scope.
French cinema has always been very interesting, and it's still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it's great to still have a cinema that doesn't try to emulate, for example, American cinema.
Hollywood is a wonderful machine for making big movies. In France, we make smaller and more personal films, but if things keep changing, this will disappear. The industry in Italy is practically gone. Cinecitta now is used mostly by filmmakers from others places, like Martin Scorsese.
I think it's important that nobody forgets that although Hollywood commercially dominates the world cinema, in fact what comes out of the filmmaking here is only a tiny slice out of the massive amount of operation that goes on around the world.
When you make a movie, you really have to be clever and smart, find something new for the worldwide audience because you aren't making a movie for just France or Germany; it's for everyone in the world.
As much as we'd like to believe that our work is great and that we're infallible, we're not. Hollywood movies are made for the audience. These are not small European art films we're making.
France has not only built a bureaucratic barrier against American culture, it has constructed a notorious intellectual case against it as well. The French spend hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing film production, extend interest-free loans to designated filmmakers, and have placed quotas not only on imports but on television time.
I think in Europe, movies are made like a commodity and then sold as art.
Cinema has become a global economy, totally international.
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.