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I was thinking of going to London drama schools or to New York, because France didn't accommodate the things I wanted to do in film.
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Female influence came from my grandmother and my aunt. They would sing Corsican love songs while cleaning the house and dress all in black and say melodramatic things like: 'I want to die.'
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My father is best known for his light comedies, and I'm best known for crazy bad guys with short tempers.
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I used to be more self-conscious about style because when you're younger, you want to exist, you want to show everything you do.
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As a younger actor, I had delusions. I would dream of Scorsese and De Niro; I would meet people, and it would be like this, and it would change moviemaking in France, and Paris would become the center of the world.
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I think it's much harder to have a long dialogue scene than an action scene. An action scene is long, but it's not really hard. It's kind of boring, really. It looks good at the end, but to shoot it, it's not the most exciting thing.
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And now I have a big house, nice clothes and I travel in first class and I love it, so maybe it's time to enjoy being a star.
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I have learned that acting is not about beauty.
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You can't escape from what you are.
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I didn't have many girlfriends in my youth. I was an active young man, jumping from one girl to the next, but never with anyone for more than three or four months.
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I worked with young directors all my life, only young directors.
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I feel to look for perfection is a very dangerous path. More than that, it's dangerous because it doesn't exist. You can aim for it, but you already know you won't get there because it doesn't exist. Plus, I definitely think the flaws, little cracks, and accidents are a lot more interesting.
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As an actor, I think you should always disappear a little. I act in order to lose myself.
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I'm more attracted to the bad guys. Why? Because in real life, I don't know any good guys. I know okay guys. I know polite guys. I know people who can control themselves.
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I don't really shop any more. I only do it when I have to. I think it is very overrated.
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I always had the sense of being in the spotlight, being on stage, being looked at.
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My father danced a lot. He was called 'the French Fred Astaire.'
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I think American audiences like gangster movies. You know, it's part of the culture.
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I've always loved the idea of changing myself, wearing costumes and disguises. It takes you back to being a kid, to dressing up.
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What I think I'm perceived as in France is, like, I'm this leading man always doing strange movies because most of the movies I did, like 'Irreversible' or 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' and a bunch of others, and even in France, they always come out as a particular movie, not like the typical French kind of movies that people know most of the time.
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When you appear on the screen, often enough you become sexy, even if you look like an elephant.
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I'm moving to Rio permanently with my family. It's one of the places left in the world where people still live with a big charge of poetry on a daily basis. I feel we've kind of lost that here in Europe.
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The minute your parents die, you stop fighting them. I realized the more I changed my face for films, the more I looked like him. I always liked to disguise myself because I was trying to run away from his image. But all that is not worth it.
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The relationship I have to everyday life is very European. We have a different relationship with religion, with faith, with nudity, with sex, with food.