Quotes

[speaking about Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival] The beating heart is the fact I wanted to produce a love story, a film which talks about a love story and step by step depicts what it's like to fall in love; and also shows the scope of a love story - the film was built around these two ideas, these two pillars, so to speak, without opting for one or other of the pillars in particular. And also I wanted to talk about women artists, women painters, in general. So, if you like, it's that which constitutes the three beating hearts of the film.

[press conference for Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival] I hadn't made a film for about five years and I had in mind a film which would span a period of about three years; I was looking for the right shape, the balance or imbalance between all these various ideas. In the film we think about how you look at things, how you look at creation, how someone looks at someone else and you have this amorous dialogue as well. In other words, the film depicts all these ranges of things - it's not so much a question of contrast, but it's a range, it's a whole palette of things; it shows the growing desire, a mounting desire and of course there are references to the mythology of a muse, and I think the idea of a muse appears but of course in this case it was just all of us working together - we drew inspiration from each other. It's quite physical as well - what's it like to fall in love? I think often in the cinema we end up with something very conventional - a comedy or a drama - for example, people meet in a lift and immediately fall head over heels in love, but here my idea was to really look into what it was like to fall in love, to be in love.

[Cannes press conference for Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)] We have this idea that you have to create opportunities - you have to create new scenes, new images, new forms of pleasure. I thought about the kiss scene for many months - I had a list of different possibilities, I wondered, "How can I renew the choreography of a kiss?" What everyone remembers is how you sort of come together, and the cinema should offer new images, create new memories. I had a list of all sorts of choreographic possibilities and then I thought, "Well, if we sort of remove a veil or a scarf, like some people remove their glasses before kissing...", so I wanted to create new images in this manner - all of a sudden you have this idea of a kiss with the scarf or the veil and that in fact then guided a lot of what came before and after. So, how can one portray the scene of a first kiss? How can you have the impression that it's the very first time you as spectator has seen a kiss?