Michel Hazanavicius
Michel Hazanavicius
Michel Hazanavicius; born 29 March 1967) is a French film director, producer, screenwriter and film editor best known for his 2011 film, The Artist, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 84th Academy Awards. It also won him the Academy Award for Best Director. He also directed spy film parodies OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spiesand OSS 117: Lost in Rio...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth29 March 1967
CityParis, France
CountryFrance
ideas desire way
An idea is something you work on to make it work and a desire is much deeper in a way.
ideas desire way
At the very beginning, it's a desire and that's not the same thing at all, because when you have the desire to do something, all the work you can do is a positive thing. It's not something that you calculate. An idea is something you work on to make it work and a desire is much deeper in a way. The immersion, it's classical, I watched a lot of movies.
thinking phones way
I think we are at the very beginning of high changes, not only in terms of digital film, but in the way the movies will be screened, whether they'll be screened on phones, on computers - on everything
french maybe movies
Maybe I've seen more Hollywood movies than French movies.
accurate bed cannot crew fact good helped la mary movies respect rules shot silent studios tried
I try to respect the rules of the silent movies and I tried to make signification to make sense, and also the crew were very good and the fact that we shot in LA in the real Hollywood, studios and houses. We shot in the bed of Mary Pickford, and you cannot be any more accurate than that, so that helped a lot.
When we were making the movie, winning awards for it wasn't the point at all. We didn't even have an American distributor.
chaplin charlie movies thinks
When you speak of silent movies, everyone thinks of Charlie Chaplin first.
home writing kids
I went to Hollywood. I put the action in Hollywood. I watched a lot of movies, maybe 100 or something close to that. I have tons of DVDs now at home. I don't know what to do with them because they're not useful anymore. My kids never watched them. I read a lot of autobiographies, listened to a lot of music by classical era composers like Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman and Leonard Bernstein. I listened to only that kind of music the entire time I was writing, even at home.
talking people desire
First of all, I had the desire for that format [silent movie], and then when I was talking to people, I felt that people needed justification. Why are you doing a silent movie? Is it just for your own pleasure? I felt it was not enough for them so I realized I have to choose the subject that will make things easier for them and to tell the story of a silent actor makes sense for doing a silent movie.
wife hollywood world
I looked at a lot of photos from Hollywood in the '20s, photographs of silent movies being filmed all over the world which are very specific and very evocative. Berenice, the lead actress, is my wife. She really followed the same path with me.
thinking decision want
Finally, you're right about one point, your entire way of thinking is predicted by what you're immersed in so you know you won't make a bad decision. You can make a bad decision but it's still in the good sphere normally if you work well. You're prepared to face a crew who wants to know everything and poses a hundred questions a minute, because you know you have good reflexes and can respond very quickly.
men editing cameras
I watched a lot of movies from all over the world. The Russians were very good at editing. They were specialists in editing. The Man with a Camera, if you know that movie, is incredible. I still don't understand how it works. It's a movie with no script, no actors and still it works. It's really good. It's really about editing.
artist cinema movement
The Germans were much more graphical. The expressionism is much more than cinema. It was a movement with artists, painters, music and architecture, so it's really graphic and visual. And the French were something else.
kings laughter mean
I chose the American ones, more or less the last five years of the silent era, because those are the ones that aged the best in the way they tell the story. One, it's about human beings with context. It's a very classical story with feelings, with laughter, melodrama and it really works, the good ones - Murnau's American movies, John Ford's Four Sons, King Vidor's The Crowd, or the (Josef) von Sternberg movies. You can watch it now and it still works. I mean they are really, really good pieces so this is where I tried to work.