I'm the only Mauritanian filmmaker so it wouldn't make sense to make a film in France. I could shoot outside of my own country if the story was something that called for it. Africa really has to be the reason for me to make a new film.
The rule I have when choosing films is the excitement factor, I need to feel excited about the story and whatever message the film has - only then do I sign on the dotted line.
Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them. [Witness for the Prosecution, also published in The Hound of Death and Other Stories.]
I try to turn a written thing, when I'm in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
Because when you go out, and you have fun, basically you're performing for these tabloid outlets and the paparazzi. And when you perform and create this story, they're chuffed - they get excited, they capture it, and they put it out.
Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.