The Legion of Honor is the most prestigious award in France and
presented to those having exhibited outstanding lifetime achievement in
their chosen field of work. Instead of inviting him over to France for
the ceremony, then French president François Mitterrand personally went to Ray's
doorstep in Calcutta to present him with the honor.
For the cinema it's much better to be more concentrated in time. It's an instinctive feeling: I can't put it into words why I feel like that. The film's better if the period is a day or a week or fortnight or a month, so that nobody grows up: everybody's as they were in the beginning.