Politics & Power Quote by Adrian Lyne

Dislocation is doing the talking here: Lyne frames himself as split not by pathology but by geography, using "a little schizophrenic" as a blunt, slightly careless shorthand for the whiplash of living between cultures. As a British director who built major chapters of his career in the U.S. while maintaining a strong relationship with France (both personally and professionally), he’s describing the practical, daily identity drift that comes with crossing borders and industries. The adverb "obviously" is telling: he assumes the audience already buys the premise that America and France are cultural opposites, and he’s leaning on that shared stereotype to make the feeling legible fast.

The subtext is less about nations than about codes. "Values" is a deliberately elastic word, the kind you use when you can’t (or don’t want to) list the specifics: attitudes toward sex, privacy, ambition, art, morality, money. Lyne’s filmography sits right on those fault lines. His work repeatedly stages American desire against European permissiveness and European sophistication against American moral panic, then lets the collision generate plot. So when he talks about being "different from here", he’s also talking about how a filmmaker calibrates risk: what can be shown, what must be punished, what gets framed as erotic versus dangerous.

It’s a director’s way of admitting that context edits the self. The line isn’t a neat cultural critique; it’s a practical confession about switching emotional languages, and about how storytelling changes when the audience’s taboos do.