When I was a kid, my grandfather, my sister, my cousins and I used to make little films in the summer. It was great fun during the holidays. Then I started projecting the Super 8 reels my grandfather had shot when he was young. The flicker of the image, the unsteady gate, the grain. That was when I discovered the magical dimension of cinema.

I think the first time I was truly blown away was watching Heaven’s Gate by Michael Cimino. Obviously. Everything is so grandiose in that film. There is a kind of “effortless” style in Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography that greatly appealed to the student I was. Lots of diffusion, flares, smoke — it felt like you could almost touch the light.

I would gladly rephrase “initial training” as “initial path.” I did a vocational degree in Cinematography, then began my “real” training as a camera assistant on films and television movies. At the same time, I also worked as an electrician and a grip on television sets, because my curiosity has always pushed me not to box myself in. So I worked in different positions and on different types of shoots, and I also managed to find department heads who were comfortable with that.

I started on short projects, and then one year I landed my first feature film, followed by a documentary series as DP. For the feature “Kickback,” I was up against big names from the AFC, but the director, Franck Phelizon, wanted to break new ground by choosing a young DP. There was a big cast and a modest budget, and since I was young and a bit reckless, I said yes straight away without thinking twice. There were so many adventures on that shoot! I learned a huge amount about my craft and about this baroque world of cinema.

For the documentary series, it was another wonderful encounter. Alexis de Favitski called me to help him shoot a scientific documentary series for Arte, on the theme of plate tectonics (“La Valse des Continents”). My fiction background appealed to him because he wanted crane shots, Steadicam, drone, cable-cam, Ronin, and time-lapses of the stars. There were just two of us, and we had to take about twenty flights. I had the pleasure of discovering that with well-chosen equipment and some ingenuity, you could pull off a “Hollywood” shot for every sequence. We were shooting in breathtaking landscapes. Those films gave me the taste for going far from home to film people and stories.

I’ve managed to work on many very different projects: fiction, documentaries, commercials, and music video captures. I’m currently finishing two fiction projects: “Down in Paris,” my second feature with Antony Hickling, produced by H&A Films, and “Kurt,” a series pilot where I stepped in for Christophe Larue (whom I thank), who was committed to another film. This pilot is directed by Gérard Guerrieri and produced by Injam.