Composer

I'm scared each time I start a movie, believe me. There's always a moment of panic when you're not sure if you're going to be able to meet the deadline.

I'm there to tailor something very precisely and something very subtly to dialogue and the actor's energy. I'm there to bring out something that isn't spoken. 'King's Speech' is the perfect film to do it.

I'm not a script composer. I'm a film composer and my brain is excited by images and moving elements.

I remember my sisters, they loved a movie called 'The Naked Island.' And the flute was actually playing the main theme. A Japanese movie. A beautiful movie from 1961. I remember hearing this music with a flute many, many times a day at home.

I lived in the Caribbean when I was a teenager, so I learned about Salsa and Cha-Cha and all these Latin Afro-Cuban music like Gillespie and Duke Ellington, also bridged with Jazz. But my mother is Greek, and so I've also listened a lot to Greek music. And through the years to Balcanic music to Arabic music because my father loved music from Egypt.

I liked 'The Darjeeling Limited' very much. There was a melancholy about that film that I liked.

To this day, I still travel with scores. Every time I'm on a plane - it could be Stravinsky or Mozart or Ravel.

I've scored all the movies that Jacques Audiard has directed. It's a long love story between us, trying to find a voice that would belong to his films only.

Musicals are made of several climaxes that keep growing and growing; when you think it's over, it still continues growing up in plateaus.

I wanted to be a film composer because I heard scores that could stand alone, from 'Vertigo' to 'Star Wars' to 'La Dolce Vita,' because this music has so much history. They're weighed with the history of music. They come from somewhere, they have a past.

I always tend to think that composing is not playing an instrument, composing is having something in your head that's steaming and it has to go out. It has to become sounds and be written. It's an emotion that you can't repress.

As a child brought up in Paris, I dreamed of America, that lost world my parents had left behind - it was in my genes. Plus, American music has always been close to my own aesthetic, because of the mix of symphonic music with jazz.

My parents had a lot of movie soundtracks that they brought back from the States. So very early on I heard film music at home.

I have no favorite museum, but it could be the National Gallery in London; it could be the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Every city has a great museum.

Francois Truffaut's 'The Soft Skin' starts with a very mundane scene of a family and a man driving to the airport. Yet the music is like a thriller, and you don't understand why. It's not until later that you learn it's because the movie is a thriller.

I started piano like my sisters. After one year or two, I didn't like it anymore. Then, because I like trumpet, I played the cornet. When you are 7, you can't play trumpet - you play cornet. And something didn't go well. The teacher was too hard. Too rough. Suddenly, there was this instrument, the flute, that I could immediately play.

Without fear you can't explore or push yourself beyond what you've done.

I've been pretty lucky to work with directors who were quite influenced by European cinema.

Music for films allow a great deal of diversity and the more you widen your skills, the better you become.

Certainly 'Zero Dark Thirty' is not for children!