"In New York, my father took me to movies with French themes, such as Lili, with Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer; Gigi, with Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jordan, and Hermione Gingold; and Mon Oncle, with Jacques Tati. As with the Broadway musicals I attended, my father bought me the albums to those memorable movie scores. Although the story of the endearing waif Lili and her friendship with puppets in a French carnival and Lerner and Loewe's Gigi, set in Paris in the early twentieth century, were popular movies in the United States, none of my schoolmates knew the amusing, cinematic adventures of Jacques Tati, and so in my youth I was already becoming a Francophile, like my father. Nevertheless, I could not have imagined then that a great part of my work as an artist would be created in France."