Media Circus: Adèle Exarchopoulos on Blue Is the Warmest Colour

Adèle Exarchopoulos is in London for the city’s 57th film festival. She has just done a photo shoot for a big glossy. Yves Saint Laurent were asked to supply a dress for her to wear on the red carpet for Blue Is the Warmest Colour, and press are kept hovering in the hallway of the Mayfair Hotel while she tries it on. When I’m summoned for the interview, she’s sitting among a bombsite of clothes and beauty stuff and camera equipment and handlers, a black cocktail dress hugging her, a stylist fussing over her hair. In two hours, the Palme d’Or-winning, sex abuse claim-trailing Blue Is the Warmest Colour will premiere at the London Film Festival. Then it’s a sponsored dinner, an afterparty, a flight out to another junket and premiere.

I navigate my way to a seat next to Exarchopoulos and introduce myself, but there’s not a hint of response. I lean over and place a dictaphone in front of her, but she doesn’t seem to realise she’s being interviewed. She pushes the creases of her dress and shares a joke with the guy doing her hair. Then she turns and raises her eyebrows, as if to say, ‘You should begin.’

How does she find speaking to the press? “So many times I have done interviews. In Cannes, after Cannes, every day for two months. And you, you all speak about the same things. That’s why it is really boring, because you all reduce the film to sex and controversy.”

You’re frustrated by it all? “Yeah I was frustrated but now I don’t care. Now I understand I can do nothing. So many people have said to me, ‘In my article I’m really going to understand the controversy. I’m really going to understand what nudity is for you.’ They try to turn things away from the film.”

“I’m really sorry,” her stylist interrupts, and blasts her hair with an industrial-sized dryer.

Exarchopoulos is 19, but she doesn’t seem very awed by all of this. The daughter of a guitar teacher and a nurse, she was born and raised in Montparnasse, near the Place des Fêtes on Paris's Left Bank. She has Greek ancestry and two younger brothers and, until the age of ten, was almost wordlessly shy. Her parents encouraged her to act to help her anxiety in public. By 12, she had her first film role. By 13, she had an agent. Blue Is the Warmest Colour, for which she shared a Palme d’Or with her director, Abdellatif Kechiche, and co-star Léa Seydoux, is her tenth film.

And what a film. It’s a genuine five-star trail-blazer. A love story about – and a love letter to – sex and youth and pride and the loss of innocence, powered with incredible force and commitment by Exarchopoulos and Seydoux, and by the intimate courage of Kechiche’s direction.

Set in the northern French city of Lille, the film charts a love affair between Adèle (Exarchopoulos), a 17-year-old student from a lower middle-class family, and Emma (Seydoux), an openly gay twenty-something artist from an affluent, liberal background. Yet it is Adèle’s story we are told; from the moment she first becomes aware of her desires, to an abortive early attempt to have sex with a boy, to meeting and falling headlong for Emma, to leaving school and becoming a nursery teacher, to trying to support the more career-driven Emma in an artistic pursuit that is at best private and remote.

The sex scenes in this film are explicit and unflinching – one continuous sequence lasts for 12 minutes. Yet they’re also powerful and moving. It’s a film capable of making you feel like a teenager again, capable of bringing back what it felt like to have sex for the first time, how life-altering and fundamentally significant it all felt. It’s a film of unbridled emotions and intensity that does not for a moment feel forced or melodramatic or ratcheted beyond itself. Instead, and despite a runtime of over three hours, we’re left feeling deeply invested in a tiny chapter of these characters’ lives. We’re left desperately wanting more.

Kechiche succeeds in asking a basic but needling question: why are we so accepting of sensationalised violence on screen but so scared of turning sex – something we all do, and into which we all have a degree of insight – into something heightened and cinematic?

In talking honestly about this, the film has mired itself in a controversy partly authored by Exarchopoulos herself, and which now bugs her so much on the press circuit. Talking to The Daily Beast shortly after the film’s world premiere in Cannes, Léa Seydoux revealed she and her co-star were “made to feel like prostitutes” on a “horrible” set, depicting Kechiche as an aggressively extorting director who would throw things and scream at them if he didn’t get his way. The 12-minute sex scene allegedly took ten days to shoot, with the actors asked to do take after take after take – no pre-direction, no choreography, three cameras surrounding them.

“You can’t presume or summarise a human adventure” – Adèle Exarchopoulos

“Once we were on the shoot, I realised that he really wanted us to give him everything,” Exarchopoulos told The Daily Beast. “Most people don't even dare to ask the things that he did. They’re more respectful.”

Both have vowed never to work with him again. Kechiche has responded by talking of his own “humiliation” at their behaviour. He’s been totally absent from press duties in London, and has basically disowned the film since, saying to the French magazine Télérama: “I think this film should not go out, it’s too dirty. The Palme d'Or was a brief moment of happiness, then I felt humiliated, disgraced. I felt it’s a rejection of me, a curse.”

Does Exarchopoulos now regret talking about the humiliation she felt at the hands of Kechiche? “I don’t regret. I stand by what I said. I regret that people speak a lot about it because they don’t know what they’re speaking about. You can’t presume or summarise a human adventure.”

Did she expect such a fevered reaction to her comments about her experience on set? “No, never. I didn’t realise the impact it would have. It was very surprising. It hasn’t sunk in because it was so crazy.”

How did she feel on the shoot? “I had a bit of a continuous feeling during shooting, but I was helped by the fact that we shot chronologically, as I could understand what was happening all the time.”

Would she change anything, if she could do it all again? “No, nothing.”

Blue Is the Warmest Colour has not reinvented the wheel. Few national cinemas lionise youth as brazenly as the French; few seem so earnestly enamoured of first love, sexual awakening and innocence lost. Over the last year, Olivier Assayas has released Something in the Air, about the serious art of chasing girls in the pseudo-revolutionary 70s, while his partner, Mia Hansen-Løve, has talked openly about the teenage love affair that led her to make Goodbye, First Love. The godfathers of French cinema were at it too: Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou is a young love story, as is François Truffaut’s Baisers volés, the sequel to Les quatre cent coups, and Eric Rohmer’s Full Moon in Paris.

Blue Is the Warmest Colour is more than a match for its contemporaries, even good enough to be compared to the best of the New Wave, because it’s taken something familiar and pushed it to its limits. Using methods that appear brutal in their antiquity, Kechiche has forced his actors to go to places they will probably never go again, and framed every moment – sexual and otherwise – in delirious and exacting close-up. First love was so intense, so immediate, so possessed of life, and he has managed to recall it in unvarnished honesty. Despite the Palme d’Or, Exarchopoulos and Seydoux may secretly regret the experience. Despite their claims of his genius (which Exarchopoulos reiterates during our interview), they may have been exploited. Despite his lofty proclamations, this film seems tinged by Kechiche’s own latent desires. But nevertheless we now have a film, a creation of body and soul, that will live on in undimmed romance. Exarchopoulos is right; we can’t really know what it was like. But thank you for going through it.