How do French audiences see British films?
For most French people British cinema is Ken Loach. They see the films as socially aware and right on. “For certain gay directors (making gay films) is a way of moving out of the margins where they’re placed. Making films are a way of getting into the centre. So they have this feeling that their only weapon is their homosexuality.” You’ve said you find French cinema today provincial and bourgeois. Are you trying to break away from that? French cinema has other faults apart from being bourgeois. It’s difficult nowadays because at one point French cinema was the leader in auteur cinema, but it is no longer the case. The definition of auteur as a writer / director of films is very hard to pin down now because a lot of people who call themselves auteurs…their points of view are not how I would express myself as an auteur. That’s why in my films I have references to what I believe was the Golden Age of French cinema – the New Wave – and I do it to remind people that’s what we should go back
