My mother saw double when I was born. My brother Francis and I are twins, identical ones as you can see. Guess who is who?

Pick up your TV remote. Press "fast forward". Let childhood fly by at top speed Stop! Play!

The story begins at the age of fifteen or sixteen. I loved drawing and I had started studying graphic art. I worked as an artistic director in the advertising industry for a few years. Then I became the head of advertising for the magazine "Pilote". One thing leading to another, I started writing advertising copy and I worked as a free-lance designer and editor for agencies.

In the 1970s, the cutting edge in the area of company communication was the slide show presentation and the corportate film. And so the audio-visual world came knocking at my door. This means of expression allowed me to combine my graphic skills and my love of writing. I set up a production company with a friend and we launched ourselves on the market. We weren't much good! My partner decided to move to Brazil and I kept the business going alone. Over the following fifteen years or so, I made a large number of industrial films.

At the same time, I was devouring movies. I would see everything that was released, masterpieces and turkeys. My Cinémathèque was as much the Grand Rex as the Palais de Chaillot. Seeing so many films, and enriched by my experience as a director of commissioned films, I thought to myself, "Why not me?" I observed how screenplays were constructed and I started writing. I wrote half a dozen stories without any success. To make things even more complicated, I didn't know anyone in the film business.

One day, a friend gave me a Greek novel entitled "Une jeune fille nue". I decided to adapt it. I wrote the screenplay and looked for a producer. I never found one. Having been awarded an advance box-office receipts grant, I told myself that I wasn't going to let the money go to waste and decided to produce the film through my own company. A year after completing it, I managed to find a small distributor. The film was released on January 16, 1985, with five prints. It was minus 18 in Paris that day and you could have ice-skated on the pavements. I ended up with a 3-million-franc debt that it took me eight years to pay off.
My film "career" had just begun...