Such terrible anxiety! I've tried everything since, from psychoanalysis to flight simulator sessions. For the time being, all I can say is: "Since I've been taking the flight simulator, I've never been scared... in a flight simulator! At Air France, the day it cures me, they'll be able to claim victory! "But something has changed: I've gone from being a coward who wouldn't go anywhere to a good, responsible and even credible environmentalist. An ecologist who thinks, among other things, that we can't all travel like this any more... at least until we invent the clean plane! I'm very much in love with my planet, and I think people are ruining it. Why, for example, is everyone rushing around everywhere? Everyone wants to go and see the pyramids... but leave the pyramids alone, they're being ruined by all this traffic! These days, even the smallest gnu from the farthest corners of the planet has the right to visit everything, everywhere! But the privacy of our planet must be respected...
Olivier Roellinger is a master who, with his magnificently simple cuisine and the spices he fetches himself, saves me the stress of travelling and just gives me a taste of the other side of the world!
It's true that I don't go as far by TGV, but what a brilliant invention! No, not for its speed: why does everything always have to go faster? What appeals to me is that it touches the ground, and I need that! I also like the comfort, and the people I can meet. For example, I met my favourite philosopher, Michel Onfray. Sometimes I feel like saying to all the passengers, in a drunken voice: "I've opened the baaar... hurry up, there's not much left...".
I have a great time in hotels when I go there to write. I stay there for three or four weeks, in the sun, by the pool... The hotels I like often have character. I know all the best ones - I'm 58 after all! The Barrière, the Concorde Palm Beach in Marseille, the Regent Petite France in Strasbourg, the Domaine de Rochevilaine in Brittany, the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz... In this one, I remember a beautiful young woman who rushed over to kiss me! I was a bit surprised, of course: "I adore you and I promised my girlfriends I'd do the same if I met you! I didn't chicken out either...
That's what travelling is all about: discovering other people, opening up, growing... doing things you didn't feel capable of!
Five dates
1950 I was born in Saint-Mandé, in the Ile-de-France region.
1981 My first feature film, Diogène, was selected as a parallel selection at the Cannes Festival.
2000 My first novel, L'Utopitre, is published by Flammarion.
2005 In my show Comic Symphonic, with the Orchestre symphonique lyonnais, I mix music and humour ... like a chef!
2008 I created my offbeat show about biodiversity, Mon frère l'ours blanc, at the Salle Gaveau in Paris.
