I moved to the States for the first time when I was nine but I don’t think I fully settled until I was 13. Of course it was not easy but my family and me went through the journey together. Being a child is always hard and moving of country does not make it easier. Especially, when you are into different things because as a kid we are trying to figure ourselves out while simultaneously figuring other people out.

When I was a teenager in Georgia, I always felt like the odd one. I never felt like I fit in. My dad and I would go to Blockbuster and look for Asian films and we could never find any. If we saw a Jackie Chan movie, we would watch that because it was so comforting to see a face similar to ours.

I grew up in Asmara, as a kid I was very quiet and silent and very active at school, I remember how scoring low marks would leave me disappointed so to prevent this I was always stuck with my books aiming to score high marks. I was a member of the volleyball team at school; I actually loved this sport so I played till high school but later I totally dropped it off.

The film resonated deeply with 13-year-old boys. It seemed to give expression to all their insecurities and fears. It is about a teenage boy who’s lost his dad, his mom and his older brother, and I think the whole story is his coping with this great loss by fantasizing about death and this ominous figure who strides through your life quite unpredictably and more than decimates it. It dealt in a very entertaining way with a subject that haunts all of us at the back of our minds.

Well, my mother and I were discussing how my father left when I was nine months old, and then she remarried and divorced again. I feel like I had blocked out that part of my childhood. I went back with her trying to piece it all back together. I was looking at it through 46 year-old eyes and thinking it was basically ten years of bullshit.

Oh God — I look back now, and it seems so gross. At just 14 years old, I had to wear a thong bikini. And then they used that scene in the trailer, so my entire school saw it! There are still men who come up to me today and say, "You were really hot in that film!" I was 14, for God's sake!

For a long time I thought I knew for sure who I was. I grew up in New Orleans and became a comedian. And there was everything that came along with that. The nightclubs. The smoking. The drinking. Then I turned 13.

When I was ten, my family moved to Downers Grove, Illinois. When I was twelve, I found them.

I live cinema. I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from then on my memories virtually coincide with the history of the cinema ... I'm not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through cinema; everything that I've had in the way of education has been through the cinema; insofar as I'm interested in images, in books, in music, it's all due to the cinema.

Growing up in L.A., for me, was a lot different than you’d think. I was the daughter of a hardworking pizza man who ended up kickin’ it with the rich kids. I lived in Malibu because we opened a D'Amore's pizza there. I'd make just enough money delivering pizzas so I could pay for gas and valet at the hottest clubs. I worked to party. I must have been fired from D'Amore's 100 times. But being the owner’s daughter had perks. And, of course, free pizza for life, so I never starved.

I don’t think being 13 to 15 is an easy time for any boy. It’s like a big puberty race, and if you’re coming in last, it’s not such a great race to be in. I was a hyper-religious, quite naive and very judgmental kid. I was unpopular for three years, and then it all kind of switched when I was 16. But I had already been marked with the “I’m going to fucking get out of here and show you bastards what’s what” tag. So I’m very grateful for that period of challenge between 13 and 16, facing the blinkeredness of that kind of schoolboy mentality of, like, “You’re gay, you’re bad at sports, you’re this, you’re that.” Because it did make me think: “I don’t want to end up in some bank, where I’m going to have to take this kind of shit off these same people for the rest of my life. I need to get out of this fucking treadmill 'public school, into university, into a bank, into a summer house in France'.”

I didn't stay very long in Los Angeles. I really haven't got time to deal with the clichés which Sofia suffers from playing roles linked to her origins. I had to cut short my stay there to shoot Pascal Laugier's film, MARTYRS. That film really allowed me to move beyond the stereotypes within which actors from North Africa are too often confined. To me, the important thing is not that Sofia lives in Los Angeles – she could just as easily live in London or Paris. What's important is that she decided to go and live far away to realize her dreams freely and independently of her family

That sense of being an outcast continued into high school. “I just wasn’t popular; I cried a lot, I was very shy. I would cover my head with a blazer. I wouldn’t be able to talk – I just was a loner. And my only escape was the music room.

I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.