You went to film school in New York?

Yes, I lived in New York from 1982-85, while I was in film school at New York University. I was 23 at the time, and it was very exciting because it was the first time I had lived abroad. I had been living in Paris, but everything in New York was an adventure for me, even just finding an apartment.

I had applied to film schools in London and Belgium too, but it's because of New York that I chose NYU. I also really liked American movies, films by Scorsese, Woody Allen and Cassavetes, so in a way that also led me to NYU.

You made two features before this, and have completed another film since "When the Cat's Away." What are your other films about?

I made my first feature in 1992: "Riens du Tout" with Fabrice Luchini. It's the story of the manager of a French department store who wants to modernize the company using new American management techniques. He thinks he'll be able to unite the staff, but finds that these methods don't work in France. After that I made "Le Peril Jeune," about a group of five friends in high school in 1975.

After "When the Cat's Away," I made "Un Air de Famille," based on a play about a sort of dysfunctional family that I adapted for the screen. "Un Air de Famille" was an even bigger success in France than "When the Cat's Away."

The two films are really mirror images in a lot of ways. "Un Air de Famille" is very controlled, whereas "When the Cat's Away" has a much freer, more spontaneous feel. I would have made "When the Cat's Away" in a different way if I didn't know that I'd be working on "Un Air de Famille" right afterwards. For me it was very important to make these two films right after each other.

Both films explore the theme of families, whether it's the family you're born in, or a family you create, and how you make connections with the people around you. In a way all my films have looked at the question of how a person exists in relationship to a group. The subject that I keep coming back to is the link, and the difference, between individual issues and social issues.

"When the Cat's Away" started out as a short film?

Yes, when we began it was supposed to be a short. I wanted to make a film that would tell a simple story--one that wouldn't have any money problems, so that I would have real freedom.

I started out with a story a friend told me, something that really happened. She had gone on vacation and left her cat with Madame Renée--the real Madame Renée, who plays herself in the film--and when she came back the cat had run away. Just like in the movie, Madame Renée rallied her friends to help the girl find her cat. A lot of scenes in the film replay actual episodes from this story.

It was a story about a girl who loses her cat-- a simple subject for a short film, and I had planned to stick very closely to that story. But the feature is more about the loneliness of the girl, and about how this girl resembles Paris--it's both about Paris and a single girl.

What was it about the story that made you want to film it?

What I liked about this story from the beginning was that I thought it was a good way to talk about Paris and about how people who don't seem to have anything in common can connect with each other.

It also struck me, since it involved several people I know and had occurred in the Bastille neighborhood, which I know very well. I was looking for a subject for a short film about Paris, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

We opened a small production office, to serve as a combination casting office and base for locations scouting, in the Rue des Taillandiers in the Bastille.

But when we really got into the casting I discovered all these wonderful people: Renée LeCalm, who plays the old lady who looks after Chloé's cat, the other people of the neighborhood, old and young, who were going to be playing themselves in the film, and the actress Garance Clavel (who plays Chloé). I realized that these people were too interesting for just a short film. To stick to what I had written would be really frustrating: there would only be short scenes without enough time to let the characters have a chance to really develop. At the beginning the whole movie was built on the idea that everything would go very fast, like the scene of Chloé going away on vacation, but I thought that with these great characters we came across, it would be a mistake to run from one character to another or from one action to another, so I decided to spend more time with the individual characters and to take more time to let the story and themes develop at their own pace. I think that really saved the story. Because you get to spend time with the characters, you begin to understand them and become more and more interested in what happens to them.

One of the producers also realized that the film was taking on a new shape, and so two weeks before we were supposed to start shooting we decided to try to transform this short film into an inexpensive feature. We pushed back our start date by a week and decided to extend shooting for an additional week.

I spent that extra week of preparation time rewriting the script, creating new characters and new scenes. We also gained more time to rehearse with the actors and the residents of the neighborhood we were shooting in.

How did you discover the lead actress Garance Clavel?

We held a very traditional sort of audition and had a lot of actresses read for the part. Garance really came out of nowhere, since she had done only a television movie before this. But as soon as I saw her I knew that she was the character, because she has a freshness and an originality, and a fragility, and yet she is a very strong personality at the same time. I really liked the fact that she is both strong and fragile at the same time.

The film was shot improvisationally?

Yes, but it was me who improvised during the shooting, rather than the actors. The film was actually created almost like a jazz piece. I had some preliminary ideas and the aim was just to start, to keep playing and let things fall into place along the way. It was literally made while we were shooting.

Based on what worked during the day's production, I would rewrite the next day's scenes that night. Or sometimes I would even decide to change the scene around while we were shooting with the actors. We also had a week of rehearsals with the actors before shooting, so I asked them to improvise a lot then. But once we began shooting a certain scene, I had them stick to the script.

Still, a lot of things that we came up with during the shooting came from the actors. For example, one day the actors were trying on various costumes in a store that we were using for our wardrobe, and Olivier Py, who plays Chloé's roommate Michel, was teasing some of the actresses about how they looked in the clothes. And that gave me the idea for the scene where Chloé is going out and he helps her decide what to wear. A lot of things happened like that. A week before shooting began I went to a party where there was a couple dancing salsa and I was impressed at how well they danced together, which made me think about the scene where Chloé is walking in the street and she sees the dancers. It was more that I tried to make myself aware and open myself up to all the things going on in Paris at that moment, so that I could capture things that were happening around me. There was a church in the neighborhood where we were shooting that was being destroyed, so I decided to incorporate that into the story of the film. I tried to connect all these things that were going on around us to the movie.

The film is chaotic so that it resembles the chaos of the city--a sort of big melting pot where different people and different worlds live together without any order or logic. "When the Cat's Away" is built like a little town with winding streets. You take one of these streets and find yourself at a dead end, where you have to go under a porch to cross a building and come out in a boulevard... Although it seems to be complete anarchy, you get used to it.

I also compare my method of working on this film to what Henry Moore, the English sculptor, said--that he never worked with sketches in preparing his sculptures, but he preferred working with models. That's what I did. I didn't work so much on the script, which is a literary medium, to make this film, but worked much more closely with something that is closer to moviemaking--I made the film more during the rehearsals in the week before the shooting than I did writing the script.

The film has a real insider's love of the neighborhood of La Bastille. Do you live there?

No, I don't live there now, but I did for a while. A lot of my friends live there still, and I know the cafes where a lot of the action takes place. I thought it was funny that I had some friends who go to the Bar des Taillandiers, a sort of locals' hang-out, and other friends who frequented the Pause-Cafe, a trendy new cafe, and I thought that this was an opposition that happens a lot in Paris.

So is that neighborhood a sort of microcosm of the changes that are happening in Paris?

Yes, I think that this sort of thing happens all over Paris, but that it's especially symbolic in the Bastille because the difference between the old and the new is so pronounced. On the one hand Jean-Paul Gaultier's showroom is in that neighborhood, but then you also still have people who work in very traditional jobs, like making wooden furniture. The people who live there are a very mixed bunch.

The film seems in ways to be a record of Paris at a certain moment. When was the film shot?

We started production in March, 1995 and shot for 4 weeks. While it is set at a precise moment, the things depicted in the movie are still going on. The face of Paris is still changing, and gentrification is still going on. The history of Paris is based on gentrification. Right now we're in a stage where there is a really big opposition between Paris and the suburbs, since the poor are being forced out into the outlying areas and only the rich can afford to stay in Paris.

You could still make this film today. But during the production, I tried to incorporate everything that was happening at that precise moment, like the election of Jacques Chirac, to give you a sense not only of place but of time. The film was also made with the music of that moment.

It's unusual for a film to pay such attention to older characters and their relationships to young people...

I think that was a theme that developed while I was working--the theme of the new in opposition to the old, of the modern or trendy versus the traditional. For me that's the definition of Paris: it's both a modern city and an old city at the same time.

A lot of the characters are not professional actors, but people playing themselves.

About half the actors in the film are non-professionals. Renée and most of her friends are not actors. The photographer and the models are really a photographer and models. In every scene I tried to mix actors and non-actors. I worked with the professional actors and the non-professionals in the same way. We mixed them all up and got a sort of ping-pong effect watching the actors and non-actors relate to each other. For example, the scene in which Djamel is trying to wake up a homeless man. There were some homeless men where we were shooting. I asked them if they wanted to be in the film, and when they agreed, I improvised with them and the cast for about 15 minutes and worked them into the scene.

In fact this happened fairly often. We shot a lot of the film outside, and I would try to incorporate the people and things going on around us into the movie. When we shot outdoors we kept the crew as small as we could, so that we could stay somewhat invisible. We tried to take almost a documentary approach.

Why do you thing the film has been so successful in other countries?

Part of its success, I think, is that people like Paris, and I tried to show the real Paris, not the standard, cliched postcard view of the city. When we see American movies set in France, they present such a ridiculous image of Paris--it's like a tourist brochure.

The problem with the postcard view of Paris, the one that just shows the Eiffel Tower and the accordion player, is that it tries to whitewash the landscape and show a false reality. I wanted to show what Paris is really like, that there are all these different kinds of people in Paris. Paris isn't just a city of accordion music, there's also African music, Arab music, Spanish music, American music. French culture and Parisian culture is made up of all these international influences.

Two of my producers were Arab and the other was Jewish. Vertigo [the production company] has made several movies about "ethnic" subjects-- about Arab music, for example, and the problems of the suburbs. They are close to those subjects, and this is a big movement in France because France is becoming such a multiracial and multicultural society. It's like English films in which you see a lot of Indians and Pakistanis.

I wanted people to get a feel for what Paris is really like. To that end, I tried to work with actors who were not well-known to make it seem a little more like real life. I didn't want the audience to be so familiar with the actors that they were constantly reminded that they were watching a movie.

Also, I think people can really see themselves in this movie. A lot of what's happening in Paris is the same as what's going on in other cities around the world. I was surprised that in Japan they saw this movie as very Japanese. That was because in a lot of Japanese movies they have a similar opposition between the modern and the traditional, like in films by Ozu or Kurosawa.

Finally, I think it struck people that this is a simple movie. I was really impressed by the films of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and the simplicity of his work. I thought that was a really effective way to reach out to an audience. It seems to me that aiming for simplicity is actually a good way to modernize movie making. So that was what I tried to do in this film, and I was glad to see that that was one of the things that people really liked in the movie. I think in moviemaking today we've forgotten simplicity.