The whole process of music for me is something absolutely honest and really naked and bare, so I never forced myself to write in French.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When I started writing, the first thing that came out was in English. I liked a few French things, but they were very overwhelming.
For me, playing music while I write is important. Several of the romantic scenes in 'Paris' were written with Debussy's 'String Quartet,' his 'L'Apres-midi d'une Faune,' or Canteloube's 'Songs of the Auvergne' playing in the background.
I love the musicality of English. French sounds flat. In English, you can play with pitch.
I've been learning French a bit through my work with Longchamp, and I've been in France quite a lot. And I really love how they express themselves. I especially love when something is untranslatable.
When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French.
When I was a child, I grew up speaking French, I mean, in a French public school. So my first contact with literature was in French, and that's the reason why I write in French.
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 love shooting French films because I don't have to stick with being sophisticated or stuck-up.
English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.
I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible.