Francois Ozon Quotes

Awards are like hemorrhoids. Sooner or later every asshole gets one.

I do films to be behind the camera, not in front of the camera. I'm sure I say very intimate things about myself in all my films, but it's better to say it not too directly, to be hidden behind a woman.

I think, when you are the prostitute... you don't want to be coming.

It's funny how people want to sometimes think that Young and Beautiful film is about all adolescents, but it's just the case of one girl. It doesn't mean all the adolescents are like that, of course.

Sometimes it's easier for me to do films about, and with, women, because I have more distance, I'm more lucid.

Actually, for everybody, having sex the first time is never a good time. It's always a disaster.

There is a kind of syndrome of girls who want to dirty themselves. They have the power. They control everything.

When I spoke with psychoanalysts, they confirmed to me that the most neurotic relationship is always between mother and daughter. The cliché is to think it's because of the father, the absence of the father.

Speaking with many young people, they act like their virginity is something you have to turn the page very quickly on. "It's done."

I had in mind a case close to my family, friends of my parents, who seemed to be the perfect bourgeois family, and a young boy, who when he was 17, committed suicide. It was such a shock. The parents didn't understand. Nobody understood why he did that. Everybody was exploring his life, trying to understand what the problem was. Everybody had a feeling that this guy had the perfect life: he was beautiful, he was clever... but he did that. I had that in mind, about Isabelle in Young and Beautiful, for the parents to see adolescents like aliens.

I think young people are aware, more than when I was young. There is such an obsession in the media of young people, about their beauty. The magazines and the fashion, all these kinds of things. They know that, and they use this power.

It was not easy when I was a teenager. But today, with the new technology, with the Internet, everybody can do prostitution with two clicks. During the period of Belle du Jour, it was a very strong decision to go into the profession, but now, if you need a little bit money, you go on a website and you say, "Can I have 50 dollars?" It's easy! I wanted to show these facilities.

I didn't want to make Young and Beautiful as very dramatic movie . In a certain way, I wanted to do a girly film. I wanted to make something sweet, pink. With a boy it was too dramatic and too heavy. I had a lot of pleasure with the boys in In the House, I said, "This time I will do a film with girls."

The first idea of Young and Beautiful was to have a young boy and to explore the sexuality of boys. But, I realized, with a boy doing prostitution, of course it has to deal with homosexuality. And I had a feeling it was too much for the film, you know, sexuality, prostitution, adolescence ... there were too many films for one film.