Michel Hazanavicius Quotes

French people are strange about America, I think.

I went to the States with that amount of prejudice which seems the birthright of every English person, but I found that, under the knowledge of the Americans which can be attained by a traveller mixing in society in every grade, these prejudices gradually melted away.

My wife is French, and so I get to see America through her eyes, which informs a lot of little moments. It means I can poke fun at very particular things about us.

My only experience with American things is through movies.

Living in Pakistan, you didn't have a sense of how huge and varied America was, geographically.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of things American - but when American people do British stuff, it's so universally dreadful.

England as a culture has endured so much more than America has as a culture, so it's given them a different perspective.

I'm in England so often I haven't really left, but Americans aren't at all like they're misrepresented through their politicians.

Sometimes Americans don't quite get my sense of humor. My good ol' British sarcasm seems to go over their heads.

Americans are as they are. We have to accept this. Lots of Europeans forget that.

I'm self-deprecating because I'm British, and that's what we're supposed to be. I'm sure if I was American, I'd tell you how great I was.

I grew up watching 'Ghostbusters' and 'Knight Rider' and Hot Wheels commercials. When I got to college, having never set foot in America, I knew more American pop-culture references than my friends did.

I thought, from watching TV and stuff, that America was one place. They only show you L.A. and New York. They don't warn you about Iowa.

Over the years, we settled into American life and embraced it fully. But having come from a different culture, I didn't know the boundaries of American culture. Which is that, as a girl, you didn't play football or soccer at lunch with the boys, and to be cool, you didn't get into math Olympiad.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

It's true that French are not very sophisticated in the sense that they don't dress up for dinners. They are not like Americans, where they are always perfect - the girls are not very sporty; they don't take care of themselves as much as Americans, who always have very white teeth and are so fit.

Everywhere I go in America, when they learn I'm from France, the first thing they ask me is if I'm a huge Jerry Lewis fan. I've never been able to figure that out.

Maybe something that amuses the Americans is that they are so worried about age, and I'm not at all.

I'd rather have dinner with Don King than with Mark Furhman. But then, I'm American. I have no perspective.

We get the impression through film and TV that Americans are violent gangsters with guns or upper-middle-class people in romcoms. I really liked the people. They were really warm. They could have been Brits. I mean that in the nicest possible way.

I think we have cultural bias and practice some ethnocentrism when it comes to ethnic food in America.

People live in their part of the Union, and if they don't travel a lot, then there is a tendency to believe that the other parts of America couldn't possibly be as American as their part. You can see it in the way people in the South scrunch up their faces when they hear words like 'New York,' 'Chicago,' and 'challah.'

In America, funny women are allowed to be glamorous and funny, but over here, you're not.

American and French culture are really, really different, but in a way it's funny.

I'm good at winding up British people, but Americans are slightly different. A lot of them are more stoical. They're harder to get a reaction out of more of the time.