Abdellatif KECHICHE: “I want this film to be an exchange between me and the audience”

I had the luck to see Blue is the Warmest Color at the New York Film Festival and ask Abdellatif Kechiche some questions at a press conference, which took place shortly after the premiere.

The Day: I have a strange question: now, when the film has been completed, what do you think is it about?

“I hope you have the answer. When I broach a film, I usually have a theme or several themes, and then one of the themes may emerge more strongly than the others, and I want it to be an exchange with the audience, where they perceive the things that I am trying to communicate, so that we have a similar experience. I do not know if I answered your question, but it is a question that I ask myself as well.”

Is this a director’s cut or a release version? For films about concrete personalities, like Lawrence of Arabia, may last for two hours; such length is explained by applying improvisation as a working style during the rehearsals and, actually, the shooting, especially when the film abounds in scenes for two actors. Did you use improvisation as part of your technique? Is the final version of Blue is the Warmest Color a director’s cut?

“The length of the film came out of my sensing and feeling the rhythm than went with it, and the inner breathing that I felt with the film. I have tried to use my former films to form at my scenes, to cut them, to make them fit into something that was more of a classic model, and I do not mean that in a derogatory way, I was just trying to fit it into work with somewhat more standard, but I find that the more I go for it in filmmaking, the more I want to allow a film to breathe its natural rhythm. And therefore, I think that probably in coming years they may not be shorter, they will be longer. And in fact, in terms of the final cut, this cut is shorter than what the final cut will be, it will probably be 40 minutes longer than this one. In terms of improvisation, I would not call it exactly that, but I like to give my actors a great deal of freedom, so that sometimes they can carve out a path which may be one of discovery.”

Taking into consideration the fact that the film is about homosexuality, what is your attitude to queer cinema as a label? Whom you consider to be your forerunners?

“The film with Charlton Heston. I saw Ben-Hur. I am going to tell you a little about it. Since Charlton Heston did not really want to accept certain directions from the filmmaker (it is really a nice anecdote), he said to the actor who was playing Charlton Heston’s childhood friend: ‘I cannot tell him, but when you look into his eyes, I want you to look at him remembering that the two of you had a homosexual affair when you were adolescents. And you have to make him feel that when you look at him.’ But he could not tell Charlton Heston, of course. Heston was very embarrassed by his partner. And there was really the impression at that point that something was going on during their adolescence. That is an example of a movie that I saw in answer to your question.”

You specifically like filming very overt critical content. But this film positions politics in a slightly different way. It reflects the destructive influence of the class society on relations, but at the same time there is a feeling of collapse of illusions and irony concerning some left aspects of the French culture. Please, tell us about the political senses of the film.

“Yes, that is a subject that I treated in my previous films, and it is one of the themes that interest me and I wanted to have in this film, the being in different social classes, the difficulties and the impossibility of having a relationship function, the difficulties of acceding to a higher level of social class, what happens when after the initial carnal passion in a relationship, if you do not have other things to connect with, then inevitably the relationship cannot function and it breaks down. That is a question that I think about a lot, and I am still processing.”

Throughout the film, there are a lot of confusing scenes. One of the scenes that stood out for me was the one in which Adele meets Emma for the first time. It is rich in sexual attention, and I find it sexier than the actual sex scenes. How did you work on the fragment?

“I wanted to really bring out the emotion during that scene, but the music that I was working with did not fit, it did not work for me, and then by chance I met a musician who produced a musical sound that was very melancholic and felt right to me, and therefore, for that first meeting between them I used that, because I thought that it strengthened the emotion in scene.”

Lea Seydoux is well known in the United States. And in France, you know both performers of the leading roles. Did you go through a long casting process, or were these two actresses your first choice?

“For Lea, I did not see very many actresses; I found very quickly that her personality and her life experience corresponded to the character. As for Adele, I saw a lot of girls, some that were professional actresses, and others that were not. But as soon as I did meet Adele, I knew very quickly that she was the right one.”

Do you plan to shoot a sequel?

“I like Adele’s character very much, and when I thought about her, and imagined her, and worked on her, I thought of her far into the future, in fact, in terms of the advanced age and going through various stages and various experiences in her life, so I very much would like to keep this character, or advancing with this character. I cannot make a 20-hour movie, so yes, I would like to come back to it and continue. Of course, this is in a perfect world; I do not know exactly what will happen.”