Not many French producers work the American way. In France, the director decides everything, he has final cut. I'm trying to do things differently, without the Luc Besson solution.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
France loves American cinema because when an American remake is successful, it makes us money to produce more French films.
When I make an American movie it's going to come out all over the world-it doesn't happen the same way for an Italian film or a French film.
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.
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.
I find the stuff that is exciting to me are the films coming out of Taiwan and Iran and France. So I have the feeling I'm not making the films that American distributors want to make.
The problem is that to be a producer, one must be a gambler, and the greatest French producers were gamblers.
I'm very happy in France making movies.
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.
Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.
My way of remaining French was the financing scheme I used for Quest for Fire, with Fox funds, since it started as a 100% American production. The film was not in French and yet was French in style, reflecting my personality.
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