Biography

May 7, 1962 · Bühl, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

1.93 m

I consider myself a French filmmaker. As a person, I consider myself French-German - half half - but as a filmmaker I'm French, because I've done all of my films in France or in the French production system. I'm completely part of it.

My main influence was - and in a way still is - Alfred Hitchcock. He was very important to me in the sense that I was triggered by what he said in the interview book "Hitchcock - Truffaut: The Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by François Truffaut" [1984]. Before that, filmmaking felt very complicated to me. I began reading Cahiers du Cinéma and I didn't understand anything; it seemed very abstract, philosophical, and too complex. But when I read the book, I found all the answers to the questions that you have to ask yourself if you want to make a film - very practical questions, and not theoretical questions. Like why use a close-up here or a tracking shot there, and what effect will it have on the audience, or why is it better to film villains from far rather than close because they are more threatening. All those questions and answers in those interviews seemed very down-to-earth and practical. The book took away all the fear that I might have had plunging into that world of filmmaking.

[on La nuit du 12 (2022)] I read the back cover of 18.3, Une Année à la PJ (18.3, A Year with the French Judicial Police) (2020), the book by Pauline Guéna. She explains that in the Judicial Police, each investigator has a case or a crime that haunts them and which they can't let go of. This isn't a story in itself, but it did arouse my curiosity. So, I read the book, which tells of the author's time embedded with the Versailles Judicial Police force in 2016. I couldn't see a film in it and I also thought that there'd already been so many series covering that particular ground, right up until the final two chapters covering the investigation which features in The Night of the 12th: Clara's murder and investigator Yohann who was and still is obsessed with this case because it hasn't been solved. With Gilles Marchand, my co-screenwriter, we concentrated on the last three chapters of the book, which mention an investigation in which the murderer was never found. What I really liked was that we don't find out who did it, because it's an angle that we don't often see, except in Zodiac (2007) and Memories of Murder (2003). This ended up being a cold case, and it's this nonresolution that interested me. In crime thrillers, the criminals generally end up being brought in handcuffed and it's what the audience expects. Here the focus is turned elsewhere: towards the investigator's work and the violence that they face every day.

[on La nuit du 12 (2022)] I have a problem with a lot of Tarantino's violent scenes, because I feel he's just having fun. Hitchcock helped me because he is very good at conveying violence without showing it. So we had those tight closeups when she meets the killer, on the lighter, on her eyes, then suddenly to have the very wide shot - unspectacular in a sense - of her crossing the frame as a small burning figure. All those things come from studying Hitchcock and his film language.