Abdellatif Kechiche has not been a happy man lately. His new film, Blue Is the Warmest Colour, about a French teenager embarking on a lesbian relationship, has been garlanded with ecstatic reviews and is performing robustly at the box office since its release in France earlier this month. And at the Cannes film festival, back in May, Steven Spielberg's jury awarded his film the legendary Palme d'Or.
Still, even the Palme seems a mixed blessing for this eminently serious, soft-spoken man. "There's a certain anxiety that comes with that sort of recognition," he says in French, making a habitual pensive gesture with his hands, as if carefully weighing two bags of flour. "Suddenly you realise that what you do is very important to other people, you feel as if you have a sort of mission. There's a feeling of joy and grace. But I know from my experience of recognition" – two of Kechiche's previous works have won him France's prestigious César for both best film and best director – "that life quickly returns to normal and all the problems come back too."
It's the problems that seem to have preoccupied Kechiche since May. Following the film's Cannes premiere, a French film technicians' union criticised him for his working methods, which it claimed were disorganised, unreasonable and bordering on "moral harassment". Last month, actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux told the Daily Beast that the experience of making the film was "horrible", that Kechiche demanded "blind trust", and that they wouldn't work with him again. Seydoux later claimed she had felt "like a prostitute" shooting the highly explicit sex scenes (in which the actresses stressed they had no actual genital contact, as they were wearing "fake pussies"). Shortly before Blue Is… was due to hit French screens, Kechiche, interviewed in the magazine Télérama, said he didn't think it should be released as it had been "sullied" by controversy.
Yet film-maker, cast and crew have much to be proud of. The film itself – its French title is La Vie d'Adèle, chapitres 1 & 2 (The Life of Adèle, Chapters 1 & 2) – has been acclaimed both for its daring and its intensity. Kechiche is known for a searching, emotionally charged brand of contemporary realism, as seen in his 2007 ensemble drama Couscous. In Blue Is the Warmest Colour he depicts the emotional and professional apprenticeship of Adèle, a high-school student in Lille – played by near-newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos – who falls wildly in love with older art student Emma (Léa Seydoux), a punky blue-haired lesbian. The pair embark on a passionate sexual and domestic partnership, the film tracing its stages from tentative flirtation to eventual breakdown and beyond.
Tales of female sexual awakening are two-a-sou on the French screen, but what's most remarkable about Blue Is… is not its subject matter – though serious depictions of lesbian relationships remain rare in mainstream cinema – nor even its explicit sexual content. What's really striking is the sheer intensity of the drama and the performances. You may find yourself less affected by the sweaty, buttock-grabbing, extended sex scenes (one lasts 10 minutes) than by the scenes in which the couple argue and later have a post-separation reunion, or the unnervingly heated moment when Adèle's classmates vent their homophobia.
Blue Is… is very definitely about female self-determination, its heroines pursuing love, sex and career satisfaction on their own terms – which is why it's disappointing to see Seydoux and Exarchopoulos posing for magazine photoshoots in tawdry soft-sapphism embraces. Kechiche's intention in his sex scenes, he has claimed, was to shoot them "like paintings, or sculptures. We spent a lot of time lighting them to be really beautiful – and then the choreography of the lovers' movements takes care of itself."
Inevitably, his presentation of female sexuality has stirred up debate. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times complained that Kechiche was unaware of or indifferent to feminist debate about representations of the female body. Another female critic emerged from the Cannes press screening wondering whether Kechiche had ever actually set foot in a lesbian club (he has: he filmed in one). Then there were the comments of comic strip writer-artist Julie Maroh, on whose graphic novel Le Bleu est une couleur chaude the film was based. She blogged that the film's sex scenes weren't credible, and aired her suspicion that there were no lesbians present on set.
When I first spoke to Kechiche a few weeks ago in Paris, he was at pains to understand what people meant when they said his film was made from a male point of view. "Do I need to be a woman, and a lesbian, to talk about love between women? We're talking about love here – it's absolute, it's cosmic. I've had testimonies from a number of women – including one who's lived with a woman for 15 years or more, and said that the film revitalised her sex life with her partner."
Kechiche is an unconditional devotee of realism – or even of something beyond everyday realism. "I don't want it to look like life," he says of his cinema. "I want it to actually be life. Real moments of life, that's what I'm after."
Over five features, the director's quest for truth has led him to develop unorthodox working practices. He dispenses with the traditional calls of "Action" and "Cut", instead letting the camera roll at length, without interruption – continuing to film the actors so as not to break the tension on set. He shoots vast amounts of material: the Blue Is… shoot is rumoured to have yielded 750 hours of footage. Not quite true, Kechiche says: it was about a third of that, "but that's already enormous." He won't work to a rigid schedule: certain scenes, he says, like the sex and the dinner scenes in Blue Is… could only be shot when he and the actors were in the right mood. "There has to be the physical desire, like when you film meals – you have to wait for the actors to be hungry. And then you do two takes – you can't do more than that."
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the production of Blue Is… stretched from the planned two and a half to five months, and Kechiche was subsequently accused of running a chaotic set, of indecisiveness and tyrannical behaviour. The generally relaxed and affable Kechiche tenses visibly when discussing the union complaints. He insists, "I never showed anyone a lack of respect. I might have shouted sometimes because I thought I'd get somewhere by raising my voice – but I never called anyone names." If people find his methods chaotic, he says, so be it. "Either you want to make something that's prefabricated, mapped out, pre-programmed – or you see cinema as a real opportunity to create, like painting or literature." Besides, he doesn't see himself as unusually demanding. "I'm just normally demanding. In France, you'd say extremely demanding. Because we French spend our time whingeing and moaning. In any other country, I'd be considered perfectly normal when it comes to work."
More damaging, however, from a PR point of view are the comments of Kechiche's two leads. Léa Seydoux is an experienced transatlantic star – a regular of French art cinema who also appeared in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol – while 20-year-old Adèle Exarchopoulos is largely unknown, having made her debut six years ago in a film directed by Jane Birkin. But both actresses said they were uncomfortable with the way Kechiche pushed them to their limits. They claim he yelled at Seydoux to hit Exarchopoulos in an argument scene, and later told her to lick her co-star's snot (the snot and tears streaming during the lovers' break-up seem to testify to the drama's emotional and physical effect on the performers themselves). But Exarchopoulos has continued to promote the film at festivals and recently offered placatory words; yes, she said, she might have used the word "manipulation" in describing the director's approach, but it wasn't necessarily a derogative term.
When I meet Kechiche again a few weeks later in London, I ask whether he feels better now the film has been released in France. "Not really," he shrugs. "I still feel the film didn't come out in a healthy way. It's a bit like a marriage – you have to have a party, flowers, a carpet, light, smiles – and there's been too much controversy, too many unhealthy things that leave a bitter taste."
Kechiche admits he pushes actors to drop their natural reserves. He spends a long time preparing them to work with him, he says, mainly by getting to know them as well as he can, over long periods of discussion. "I don't know what's going to interest me about a particular person, but I know it's important to know them so that they open up to me, and to their character. My actors aren't always aware of the way I'm preparing them, but I am."
As for his own state while shooting, he says he's concentrating so deeply that he gets into what the French call an état second, or "second state" – something like a trance. "I really like that. You become sensitive to something that's very hard to define." But is he, as some claim, prone to outbursts on set? He frowns, and pauses. "Well, I sometimes, er… You know, I'm like a footballer on the field. If he misses a goal, he's [mimes a scowl] …but if he scores, it's pure joy. But if I lost my cool, it wasn't nearly as much as people have said."
I get a glimpse of Kechiche's intractable nature when an associate from his production company and one of his British publicists come over to our table and tries to end the interview, as the schedule is running late. "No," he tells them, quietly but extremely firmly. "I want to finish this off properly." They insist, he won't be swayed. "No, no, we've got some momentum here, we'll keep going. Too bad, deal with it."
Kechiche has an unerring nose for unearthing fresh talent: his previous discoveries include such incandescent young actresses as Sara Forestier and Hafsia Herzi, who both won several awards for Kechiche's films L'Esquive and Couscous respectively, and are now French screen regulars. Like our own Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold, Kechiche delights in bringing untested non-professionals to the screen.
"With Sara, Hafsia or Adèle, you could say it's also political – they're from working-class backgrounds, and it's a real satisfaction for me to bring them into a profession that wouldn't have been open to them otherwise. But the talent has to be there first, the 'sacred flame', if you like. And they all have it. You can spot it right away." Exarchopoulos's sacred flame, apparently, was revealed when Kechiche saw her eating a tarte au citron with gusto; he imagined a perfect fusion between actress and character, which is why his protagonist ended up with Exarchopoulos's own first name.
But Kechiche couldn't be accused of indulgence towards actors who find performing a painful experience. "Actors aren't paid the same as manual workers. They get the limelight, they stay in fine hotels – built by labourers, serviced by cleaners. They get photographers, makeup artists, they swank around in five-star hotels, fly first-class, and for a pretty enjoyable job of work. Because acting is a game – a very interesting and personally enriching one. It's not like a worker coming home exhausted who just needs to eat his spaghetti and go straight to sleep," says Kechiche, now sounding decidedly prickly. When it comes to acting, he says, "I find the word 'suffering' indecent."
However painful it may be to make them, Kechiche's films crackle with energy and exuberance. He scored a critical hit with his second film, L'Esquive (2003) – aka Games of Love and Chance – a boisterously entertaining drama set on a Parisian housing estate and centred on a school production of a Marivaux play. He also found box-office success with Couscous (2007), a sprawling ensemble piece about an elderly shipyard worker's dream of opening a north African restaurant. Less successful was an ambitious and, if truth be told, borderline-unwatchable period drama called Black Venus, about an African woman in 19th-century London and Paris. It comes across as brutally angry in its relentless depiction of sexist and racist abuse, but that's not what he intended, Kechiche says. "I really felt it was the film of my life, and it didn't come off."
Three out of Kechiche's five features – L'Esquive, Couscous and his debut, Blame It on Voltaire (2000) – are predominantly about north African characters and reflect his own working-class background. Born in Tunis in 1960, he moved to Nice with his parents at the age of five. His father worked on building sites, and remains the director's prime reference when it comes to the work ethic. Kechiche grew up in Nice, but today lives in Paris's Belleville area, "an Arab town". "For me the important thing about living there is that it's a working-class district, it's the social rather than the ethnic aspect that matters."
In a country that has several stars of Maghreb origin, but few prominent directors – he and Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory) are the best known – Kechiche has talked in the past about finding it hard to get himself accepted in the French cinema milieu. But that's not because of his ethnicity, he says, rather because he's working-class. "And the way I work doesn't fit the rules of the system – because I'll give a lead role to a labourer, or because my films are too long, or because I'll make a film about couscous. It upsets people in the business, but I'm opening things up."
Couscous was clearly influenced by Kechiche's own background, with its portrait of an Arab community in a French Mediterranean town; but he didn't set out to make a film about his roots: "When it comes to the themes of my films, the better it's all going, the less I like to be aware of them."
In his youth Kechiche was a passionate cinephile, but he never imagined film-making could be a real option, so took up acting instead. He studied in a conservatoire in Nice, then performed in several films. It was on the 1992 Tunisian film Bezness that he met his wife, Ghalia Lacroix; they played a gigolo and his girlfriend. Now the couple have two children, a twin boy and girl, aged eight; Kechiche proudly shows me their photo on his mobile. "This is what cinema has given me," he beams.
Film lovers may remember Lacroix as an actress in the much-admired 1994 Tunisian film The Silences of the Palace, or from Jean-Luc Godard's gnomic For Ever Mozart. More recently, she has been Kechiche's regular editor and co-writer, working on all his films since L'Esquive, although he says she has been less involved lately because of their children. "I usually write a script, rework it with her, that's the first stage – but I know she's always there to look at the work and give her opinions."
Kechiche isn't finished with Blue Is…, and plans to release a version 40 minutes longer. Meanwhile the film seems unlikely to be released in Tunisia, although he's an acclaimed figure there, having received a number of state awards. "Since making the film, I haven't dealt with the Tunisian press, or the powers that be. And right now, Tunisia is in turmoil because of the revolution – so they have other things to worry about than little me.
"In certain Arab countries it'll definitely be banned, but I think in Tunisia they'll turn a blind eye to any screenings. Politics always lags behind changes in the world. Young people see films if they want to – they download them, and no one can stop them."
As for the fictional Adèle, in French the film is subtitled Chapters 1 & 2, and leaves its heroine striding off towards her future – so will there be chapters 3, 4 and 5? His face cracks into a grin, and he shakes his head. I suspect he's interpreted my question as a way of asking whether he can imagine a reunion with his rebellious actresses – so I ask him, can he?
He laughs and says, in an oddly emphatic way, as if making a mock-formal statement: "I'm very upset that Léa Seydoux doesn't want to work with me again, it was such a dream for me to work with her." What about Exarchopoulos? "Oh, that wasn't so great a dream for me as working with Léa," he laughs again. I can't quite gauge from his manner exactly how much irony, bad blood or just amused mischief there is in these comments. "No, but really," he says, looking serious, "it was good that Léa realised that she couldn't work with me again, and that she came right out and said it. As for Adèle, she's still young. I'll wait and see how she evolves as an actor and as a personality. Because you can get lost in that profession, and I hope she doesn't."
Last week, however, Kechiche made it quite clear exactly how he feels towards Seydoux. In a lengthy statement on the French news website Rue 89, he attacks her "spoiled child arrogance", inveighs against her for making "defamatory and unhealthy insinuations", and says that "she'll have to explain herself before the law", suggesting a lawsuit may be in the offing.
He also complains of a concerted press campaign that, he says, could have destroyed him if he hadn't won the Palme, blaming, among others, the culture editor of Le Monde. Warned by Rue 89 that he was risking accusations of paranoia, Kechiche replied, "Fine! It's better than being called 'tyrant' or 'despot' – at least it's a classified illness."
Quite where this outburst will leave Kechiche vis a vis the French film industry is anyone's guess. At any rate, his future plans are uncertain. There has been talk of a film about the 70s porn actress Marilyn Chambers, although the project he most cherishes concerns the medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise. Right now, he's feeling the need to commit to something – and fast: "Either I take on new projects without stopping, or take a real break and pause for reflection… but I'm more likely to throw myself straight into work, like a whirlwind. I don't think taking a break will solve anything."
Blue Is the Warmest Colour will be released on 22 November
