European films were what it was about for me - the sensations I needed, the depth, the storytelling, the characters, the directors, and the freedom that you can't really find in American films.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I had no aspirations to be part of American cinema... I was really a Europe-based person, and those were the films I was inspired by.
I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn't like the one, two, three - boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene.
I came to Hollywood and I loved it. It was a great time, but in my head I was still elsewhere, in Europe. I believed in a certain cinema, which I still do believe in - a certain European cinema - and as a young woman being in America, I thought I was being taken away from that.
I loved American filmmakers when I was growing up. I didn't get to film school or anything. I was a very bad student. I just devoured film, but there was a point in my teens when I started to run a little film society.
When I went to university, I finally got exposed to European films, and they had a strong impact on me. I felt those films had a lot of things to say that weren't getting expressed in the films I was used to seeing.
I was born in Paris in the mid-1960s, and by the time I was 12 I had started going to the movies by myself. Most of the movies of that period never appealed to me. I didn't like the 'naturalism,' the sad or the 'down-to-earth' characters. What I wanted from film was fantasy, dreams, funny situations, extravagant decor - and beautiful women.
For years all I seemed to be doing was lobbying politicians and others to persuade them that European culture needed movies, and that we had to protect it.
During the Sixties, the Americans thought I was the greatest thing in the history of cinema.
I must say, to my great surprise and pleasure, I deeply loved making movies in the United States because of all the opportunities it gave me to work with people that I admire as artists.
For me, it was a lot of pressure to make another movie after 'Inglourious Basterds' because I didn't want to do something wrong. I wanted to have a beautiful project for another American movie.