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I get offered a World War II movie at least once a week just because I speak German and was born there. I have always stayed away from it because I didn't want to be put into that box.

Accents can be a great tool to tell a story - but if you do it wrong, it pulls you right out of the movie.

A really irritating thing when you're watching a film is if somebody's accent isn't bang-on - it distracts you from getting into the story because you're thinking: 'Where are they from?'

In fact, it is amazing how much European films - Italian, French, German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.

Germans don't speak in a German accent, they just speak German.

I love European movies and I kind of grew up on European films.

My early films were very European based. It was 'As It Is In Heaven,' 'Together,' they were great international successes, but then I did, I think, 60 movies or something.

I really want to do a film in another language. My dad's from Germany, so it'd be really cool to do a film in German. I'm not quite fluent, but I can get there. And my accent's pretty good. I wouldn't feel too out of my element.

It's funny, I started by making fake American movies, 'The Transporter' and stuff like that. I was shooting in France, but everything was in English. But then afterwards, I was looking at real French movies like the Jacques Audiard movies.

Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys.