"Gilles Laurent (co-screenwriter) and I had wanted to build a story around the quest for identity, while keeping the slant "social", in the concrete sense of the word. Bernie is a neurotic character who for thirty years has been asking himself who he is and where he comes from. At first, he's got few keys at his disposal with which to understand the outside world, even more so given that his orphanage was in the country. But he has his ways, his logic; he's really instinctive. He musters a desperate and pathetic effort to understand life. Which is why he invents a better world from scratch, and his own American thriller style story. So, I could sum up "Bernie" in one sentence: "A frustrated being transforms the tragedy of his birth into an American-style thriller". What human being could accept the fact of such rejection at birth? None. So from that moment on Bernie turns his life into a movie, a naïve puerile fiction worthy of a cartoon strip. He's a chunk of childhood in an adult's body."
(Albert Dupontel)