I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate.  I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one.  It came out of a complicated equation!  Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?”

Email. Or call a good friend. Reading this reminds me that I should instead read poetry. Or write.

The proudest achievement of my life at that time was that software. Wonderfully organized, extensible, and efficient: the culmination of everything I’d learned about programming in ten years. After a successful relaunch and Christmas rush, I was looking at my plan for 2008 and beyond. All my plans needed a huge effort for little reward, but were required for future growth. I had broken it into about 20 projects, each taking 2 to 12 weeks. But I wasn’t excited about any of them.

I’ve been devoting a lot of my time in the last five years to musical theater. It’s been my new passion. I’d love to write a musical comedy about Eleanor of Aquitaine and the troubadours. I’ve always thought that would make a wonderful musical, about a troubadour who falls in love with a beautiful queen.

But I need to show my work during the process. In the editing room, very often I invite friends and I do some test screenings with friends or people I know: editors, journalists sometimes. I ask them, Is it boring? Is it too long? What do you think?

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.

I didn’t think anything actually [before],” he nods. “And now I ask many questions. Because I don’t know what I will do in such a situation.

No, I’m a very bad father, I abandon all my children. (Laughs.) Right now I’m in the present, and the future – what’s past is past.

It’s a long journey, you know. I really believe in the work of the unconscious. You have an idea, you think about it. You dream about it. But, for me, it’s my way of working, it depends on writing of course. I don’t need to go every day in front of my computer and write something. It’s always a surprise. In the moment, it’s a necessity. You need to write, so you write a thing.

No, I’m afraid of nothing, actually. Maybe there are some genres that I would not feel uncomfortable with. I’m not sure I’d be able to do a western or a science-fiction film, but you never know.