William Klein

Being an expatriate doesn't go down well in America.

I'm known for fashion photographs, but fashion photographs were mostly a joke for me. In 'Vogue,' girls were playing at being duchesses, but they were actually from Flatbush, Brooklyn. They would play duchesses, and I would play Cecil Beaton.

I'm an outsider, I guess.

I always dreamed of working in Paris, of going to the Coupole and slapping Picasso or Giacometti on the shoulder.

I was making a film on Muhammad Ali in 1964, and I went to Miami to film everything around the fight for the world championship with Sonny Liston. I had the good luck of flying down to Miami, and there was one empty seat, and the guy sitting next to this empty seat was Malcolm X.

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, I used to think that most of these fashion creators weren't that great, and if the photograph was good, it was mostly thanks to the photographer.

I like festivals of all kinds: in 1969, I made a film about the first Pan-African festival in Algiers, which celebrated the countries that had been liberated 10 years earlier. There was a tremendous feeling of kinship.

I grew up in New York, in a rough neighborhood where our biggest concern was not getting beat up. I was always far from the center of the Big Apple.

I always dreamt of becoming an artist in Paris. Thanks to the Army, it happened.

I saw New York differently after being in Paris for a few years.

My sister was brilliant: she was in the 25 top math students in the country. When she finished college, I said, 'Spend a couple of months here in Europe. You'll get another take on life.' She never came - married some schmuck who made clothes for fat women on Seventh Avenue.

I grew up in Manhattan. For Manhattanites, Brooklyn was the sticks, a second-rate civilization. My friends and I, we were so snobby. Living in the Bronx or Brooklyn was incredible... for me, that was like a foreign country.