“My desire was that the audience forget the camera movements, forget the director, forget the team of technicians, and just see the people on the screen, and use the screen like a mirror of our existence.”

“I like to write about our complexity, our tragedy – about our double nature. At the same time, in my life I'm constantly optimistic. It's so strange to me to live in these two dimensions.”

“I knew immediately that it was going to be impossible to tell this story in a novel. I wanted to work with silence. I wanted to express the interior drama of Juliette either without words or with very simple and basic language”

Philippe Claudel is best known as a novelist, with his novel Grey Souls (2003) winning several literary prizes.  I’ve Loved You So Long is his first film as a director.  Claudel began his working life as a secondary teacher and then began teaching children with motor disabilities.  At the same time he began teaching cultural anthropology and literature at the University of Nancy and is currently Professor of Literature there.  At some point he fitted in eleven years teaching in prisons.  He claims, however, to have always been interested in film, and started making short films when he was a student.