Some directors pick an atmosphere and a situation and tally ho, off we go! They are open to improvisation — even encourage it — and discover what they wrote on set. It wasn’t like that at all. As Francis is both writer and director, he has the exact music of what he has written in his head and he makes sure that is exactly what he gets. This isn’t the kind of film where we improvise as the mood takes us. Oh, no! Here we’re serving a script that’s down on paper, right down to the last comma. (Thierry Lhermitte - from an article in “Ciné Live”, April 1998)