It's important to be vigilant at all stages of the making of a film. The theme of a work should be represented properly.
I met over a hundred preteens who told me their stories. I asked them how they felt about their femininity in today's society. I wanted to know how they dealt with their self-image at a time when social media is so important, and they have access to so much information and so many images.
Television is a sort of mirror of society, but for me, I never saw my reflection in it. Which makes it quite difficult afterwards to open up all the imaginative possibilities.
Cuties' is universal, and it raises concerns that involve all world societies.
For me, what counts the most is my film. I can express myself and therefore take care of myself through my art. Cinema not only heals me, but it can change the world.
When young girls can get 400,000 likes by doing a sexy selfie... we have to offer them another way of being. To dream of being female astronauts, engineers or presidents.
We're used to saying that women in other cultures are oppressed, but the question that I had when making the film was: Isn't the objectification of a woman's body that we often see in Western culture another kind of oppression?
When I was 10 and 11, my dream was to be a boy. I saw that there were so many injustices that women had to live with around me. I didn't want to have that; I wanted to have the freedom that little boys had.
I'm a French director, but what's important for me is that my stories have a universal message, whatever language they're filmed in.
We ask these young girls to grow up too fast. In the society where they grow up, they are asked to grow up too fast, and everything pushes them in that direction. The media creates pressure.
Today you have that exposition of your body on social media and you also have this big competition of finding 'likes' and followers and that is for me a new kind of finding love.
What happens is young girls see images of women being objectified, and the more the woman becomes an object the more followers and likes she has - they see that as a role model and try to imitate these women, but they're not old enough to know what they're doing.
Puberty is such a confusing time. You are still a child, with all that wonderful naivete and innocence, but your body is changing, and you're self-conscious and curious about its impact on others all at the same time.
I would never judge another woman. For me, being a feminist means that even if we don't agree on everything, we should fight for each woman to be free to choose who she wants to be.