As a child, I dreamed of being a film director. I hoped later on to shoot black and white films, jerkily, like the reels of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton that I used to project on to the wall of my bedroom with the family projector. Then words and sentences crossed my path; I gathered them up and used them, and literature became my means of expression. I was happy that way and forgot my earliest wishes. When, in my forties, I was offered the chance of using a camera to tell stories, it wasn’t the adult that said ‘yes’, but the ten-year-old in me who had waited his turn during all that time.
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt