“From Mastroianni, I knew at the time especially “La Dolce Vita””

“I am 18 years old on this Polaroid taken by one of my best friends, Nadia Turincev, who is now a film producer. It was in December 1996. Marcello Mastroianni had just died and Release had of course made it his “one”. I had imitated him for fun and, tac, Nadia had captured this moment. I was squatting at her house at that time. Between my 14 and my 19 years, having left my parents very early, I always lived with friends.

Of Mastroianni, I knew at the time especially The good life, which I liked the wandering, its character difficult to define, in suspense, and then its elegant lightness. Nadia, who knew Chiara a little [Mastroianni], told me that she had attended the filming of Black eyes, by Nikita Mikhalkov, in which Marcello Mastroianni played, and I listened, fascinated, to his story… We were very cinephiles, eager to discover films. I liked to read the reviews for their romantic side, their seriousness, this “life and death” side of the positions taken. Like those of Gérard Lefort, in Freed precisely, who had flights, without jargon and with good words.

“Acting at the cinema was above all an opportunity for me to be infiltrated on a set where I could then ask lots of questions, like a student. »

I was at a point in my life when I was starting to hang out with people from the cinema, from the seraglio, without really looking ahead. With Antoine Desrosières and Mathieu Demy, whom I had met at a festival when I was in second year, we would hang out at film parties. That’s how one evening, in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, in Paris, during a cocktail party organized by the Ministry of Culture, I ran into François Ozon, who asked me to play in a of his short films, The Virgins.

Things were improvised like that when I had no ambition to become an actor. Playing at the cinema was above all an opportunity for me to be infiltrated on a set where I could then ask lots of questions, like a student, about lenses, filters, film, exposure, hierarchy … The machines impressed me. I wanted to understand how a film is made. Later on Bankruptcy, of Antoine [Desrosières], I was delighted to try to be in turn a scriptwriter, a boom operator or a stage manager.

Directing has always been in the back of my mind. After the films I made with Valérie Donzelli, I was offered directing projects. But each time, I jumped off the bandwagon, because I couldn’t find a story that crystallized something personal enough. And then I surely sacralized the position of author too much… A few years ago – midlife crisis obliges! – I decided to stop playing.

I admitted to myself that, even if I had made about thirty films as an actor since the time of this photo, it was not my vocation. It disturbed my relationship with myself, it unbalanced me, bloated my ego. I wrote more, collaborated on screenplays, helped as a consultant. Until allowing me to realize myself today. Trying to be in the right place. That is to say, without overloading myself with unnecessary pressure and, above all, avoiding watching myself do too much. »