Is it the heaviness, or the slowness inherent in your adaptation project of The Red and the Black by Stendhal which precipitated the launching of The Blue Room?
No, it’s really just to meet Paulo Branco in the street during the shooting of Roman Polanski’s film. Paulo, he is like a soothsayer, he felt I would need centuries for Stendhal. It is deeply moving when someone tells you « Do something, shoot! Don’t you want to do something in three weeks ? » I searched, and there it was, we all have a book by Simenon that we found and read some day in the country house of we-no-longer-know-who. I don’t even know where this book comes from, who I stole it from. It is a book that I had already used for On Tour. In the scenario, we had call the final scene « the blue room », and there it was: a man and a woman. What does finally remain in life, apart from two bodies attracted to each other?
Very quickly, I said to myself: in four weeks, this, The Blue Room, is something I can do. It turned out that the rights to the novel were free, which surprised me a lot. There are so many people who wanted to bring it to the big screen: Maurice Pialat went very far into the adaptation, with Jacques Fieschi. Catherine Deneuve was supposed to do it with André Téchiné. Depardieu asked Chabrol to think about it. It is even said that the Dardenne brothers...
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