I had help in the form of my friend and former editor Carrie Frye

My husband, Brian Lindstrom, is my biggest supporter. There’s no doing it without him. When I was writing Torch, he believed in me more than I believed in myself. He’s always, always, always been there for me, every time I needed him. He encourages me. He believes in me.

Satya is very good at extracting the maximum value from my time and making sure I look at all the important things. He’s very thoughtful, good at working with people, working through problems in a calm sort of way.

We had a no-cut agreement when we got married, and the league honored it. She traveled with me at the time, I would not travel alone. She was very helpful, sitting through all the trials with me, and general travels, Washington, Congress, and so forth. She was very supportive. They just put it in the contract that she could always travel with me, which I wanted. It worked out very well. She was quite an asset.

That was the case for me when I made Angel, which was in English and was a big flop.

I feel myself still like a student learning many things doing films.

Not always. Actually I like to do movies but I’m quite bored with all the work around. All the promotion. Actually, when you’re successful, all this work around is quite difficult. But, I have to deal with that.

Yes and it’s also more difficult today to finance a film with a medium budget. It’s easier to make a very small film with a low budget like Le Refuge or a big comedy like Potiche with big stars. It’s more difficult when you try to make something in the middle, something more difficult in commercial terms because you don’t know exactly what the film is going to be like.

Truffaut, Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, they were the great directors of the Nouvelle Vague. They found the freedom to make exactly the films they wanted. Chabrol was important because he was able to make very strong portraits of women and very complex portraits of women. He was very clever and he had a lot of joy and pleasure. He didn’t have some big theories about his work, he just enjoyed making films. I try to work like that.

I just want to go on walking, you know? I like to continue my work of movies and just go on with the capacity and opportunity to do exactly what I want. To stay free.