I aspire to Jane Austen's precision and observation, but I'm nowhere near.

I did not meet Franklin but admired her work and scientific attitude. I did meet Hodgkin and learned a lot from her.

One was Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson. He had got his doctorate in physical chemistry — x-ray crystallography — in 1920. He was the first person to get a Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology. And he was continuing with x-ray crystallography, determining the structure of inorganic crystals. After I had accepted appointment as a graduate student at California Institute of Technology, A.A. Noyes, the head of the division of chemistry and chemical engineering, wrote to say that he had decided I should work with Roscoe Dickinson on determining the structure of crystals. This was really extremely fortunate for me, in my opinion. I don’t think that there was any field that was more suited to my interests, and I don’t really know why Dr. Noyes selected me out of eight or ten new graduate students to do x-ray crystallography. Dickinson had a remarkable mind. He was a very careful investigator and thinker, a very logical thinker. When he was teaching me x-ray crystallography, he also taught me to ask at each stage in the argument, “What assumptions are being made? How reliable is the conclusion that you draw? What chance is there that one of the assumptions you have made is not correct?” “You should recognize,” he said to me, “that there is in almost every investigation a lack of complete rigor. You should understand just how reliable the arguments are that you are presenting.

I am from a family of artists. Here I am making a living in the arts, and it has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station. My ancestors were all in the arts, so I’m simply making my living in the customary family way.

Very often I do a first [draft] and I give it to friends. I ask them to read it, to give me their suggestions; what they think, what they understand, what works or not for them. I work again and again, and I don’t stop working until the shoot. And very often during the shoot, I change the script.

I didn’t think anything actually [before],” he nods. “And now I ask many questions. Because I don’t know what I will do in such a situation.

Yes and it’s also more difficult today to finance a film with a medium budget. It’s easier to make a very small film with a low budget like Le Refuge or a big comedy like Potiche with big stars. It’s more difficult when you try to make something in the middle, something more difficult in commercial terms because you don’t know exactly what the film is going to be like.

That was the case for me when I made Angel, which was in English and was a big flop.

Not always. Actually I like to do movies but I’m quite bored with all the work around. All the promotion. Actually, when you’re successful, all this work around is quite difficult. But, I have to deal with that.

I just want to go on walking, you know? I like to continue my work of movies and just go on with the capacity and opportunity to do exactly what I want. To stay free.