Every time a director calls me and says, 'If you practice a lot in two months, can you be an American?' And I always tell them, 'Well, maybe but I'm French. So it's going to be hard to be someone else.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
But I don't think of myself as a foreigner or a Frenchman! I just think of myself as a director. Whether I'm French or Australian or whatever, it's really not important.
When I was in the U.S. for 'Swimming Pool,' people had asked me, 'So are you going to settle down in Hollywood?' And I said, 'No, I'm French! I am living in France. I am not going to be American.'
You can be an American or an Englishman or Canadian and be a Parisian. It's a very admirable culture, and people want to identify with it.
I've often gone to start a film only to find the producers surprised to discover that I'm American.
When I first tried the American accent, for a moment I thought I could never be an actor because I just could not do it. But then I thought, 'Okay, it'll just be something that I work at until I get it.'
I do consider myself as being French, I suppose.
I'm not foreign enough to play foreigners... I have sort of a mid-Atlantic British accent that puts me in the middle of everything, so they don't know quite where to put me.
You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?
So I built my entire career in the United States and that's why it feels like I'm an American actor.
At one point, in one of the kitchens where I worked, I was the only American pastry cook. They treated me poorly. 'You're stupid. You're American. You don't get it.' They'd speak French all day. At one point, my boss said to me, 'You learn French or get out right away.'