Credits: Montage Ecostylia Media (DALL·E) — photo Ecostylia Media (Cinémathèque française, 2023); background: Jeliotb / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Montage distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
INVESTIGATION & EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW. Twenty-five years after Romance, the film that caused a scandal, Catherine Breillat is the target of an accusation of exceptional gravity. In the book La Prédation (Nom féminin), then in Le Nouvel Obs and Libération, actress Caroline Ducey says she was subjected to a non-consensual sexual act. She accuses the director of having orchestrated it. For the first time, the filmmaker responds in detail, with documents to back her up. We read the one, interviewed the other at length, then put each account to the test of the evidence. Neither a court nor a soapbox: the uncompromising investigation and interview we present to you here.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We compared the book, the actress’s public statements, the screenplay of Romance, the final shooting schedule, the available testimonies, and Catherine Breillat’s detailed answers. This rereading does not adjudicate the suffering Caroline Ducey says she feels, nor the possibility of an act that may have escaped the notice of the set. It examines more precisely the accusation that the director knowingly organized and filmed a rape. At this stage, the documents reviewed do not establish it; they weaken it and shift the case into a more complex zone: that of a singular shoot and of an era whose practices today resist single-track narratives.
A serious affair, a necessary method
Since the publication of the book signed by Caroline Ducey, then the articles in Le Nouvel Obs and Libération, the affair has often been summed up in a single formula: Catherine Breillat supposedly had a rape filmed for the purposes of Romance. That formula is striking. It is also, in light of the evidence, the one that most needs to be examined.
Ducey’s book must be read seriously. It is not a mere account of unease on a difficult shoot. In it the actress speaks of a memory that resurfaced in 2001, then describes the first take of the scene known as "The Stranger on the Stairs," before directly implicating Breillat in a later confrontation. She says she was subjected, by surprise, to an oral-genital act. She goes further: she asks whether a rape was "orchestrated" against her person. This progression — memory, factual account, direct accusation — is the backbone of La Prédation.
But an accusation of orchestration cannot be proven by the sheer intensity of a narrative. It requires elements: a screenplay, a shooting order, a camera position, witnesses, traces from the set, chronological consistency. That is where the case changes in nature.
Three points stand out from our examination.
First, scene 35 of the Romance screenplay is not a scene that sprang up at the last minute. The acts are written there explicitly. This does not amount to automatic consent to an unsimulated act — no serious newsroom should confuse the two — but it contradicts the idea of a scene whose sexual content was supposedly hidden until the set.
Second, the final shooting schedule provided here, dated April 10, 1998, reverses the chronology that structures the account published by Ducey and repeated in her interview with Le Nouvel Obs. In the media narrative, Rocco Siffredi appears as a psychological threshold: she supposedly believed she had "done the hardest part," then, a few days later, was raped on the stairs. Yet the shooting schedule places the "Paul’s Apartment / Stairs" block on Tuesday the 21st and Wednesday the 22nd of April, before the days with Rocco Siffredi, scheduled from Thursday, April 23, in the "Paolo’s Apartment" block. It also shows that the set references must not be read as continuous real-world locations: Romance gathers, separates, and joins together studio spaces and Parisian exteriors. The order of the film is therefore not the order of the shoot, and the location in the film is not always the location on the set.
Third, the testimonies gathered by Libération itself do not draw a proof of orchestration. The first assistant director Michaël Weill says he has "a great deal of trouble" believing that the alleged overstepping was committed at Breillat’s instigation. The producer Jean-François Lepetit does not believe "for a second" in any scheme by the filmmaker, while not ruling out a slip by the actor. The cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis states that he would have left the set and the film had he perceived such an act. The only truly accusatory item on the crew’s side is an indirect memory reported by the makeup artist Claire Monatte, attributed to the first assistant, which he does not confirm. Here again, this is not about denying suffering: it is about ranking the evidence.
This investigation therefore does not say: "nothing happened." It says something else, more precise and more important: the charge targeting Catherine Breillat as the organizer of a rape does not emerge solidly from the documents reviewed. The most robust case, at this stage, is that of an atypical film, written as such, shot in an era when today’s protocols for intimate scenes did not exist, and in which an actress can say today that a gesture stunned her. But that case is not one of a rape organized for the camera by the director.
Catherine Breillat, a major auteur filmmaker and a controversial figure
Breillat occupies a singular place in French cinema: that of an author often reduced to scandal before anyone looked at her many films. 36 fillette, Romance, À ma sœur !, Anatomie de l’enfer, Une vieille maîtresse, Abus de faiblesse, then L’Été dernier make up a body of work shot through with desire, power, humiliation, the freedom of bodies, and the violence of the social gaze.
In her work, the body is never merely a body offered to the gaze. It is a site of thought, of domination, of resistance, sometimes of contradiction. It is this insistence that made Romance a pivotal film: not because it sought scandal, but because it posed head-on a question that auteur cinema often avoided: what becomes of mise-en-scène when sex is no longer entirely simulated, yet remains inscribed in a form, a frame, a dramaturgy?
The Ducey-Breillat affair forces a return today to that boundary. It also demands a method. One cannot answer an accusation of this gravity with a knee-jerk taking of sides. One must read Ducey’s book, watch Breillat’s film, compare the dates, question the documents, and be precise about the words. Saying "rape," "rape scene," "unsimulated sex," "prostitution," "off-screen," "consent," or "mise-en-scène" does not commit one to the same facts.
Breillat, for her part, answers as a filmmaker. She talks about the screenplay, the shooting schedule, the editing, the camera position, what is visible and what is not. Her speech is sometimes blunt, but it follows one line: cinema is the art of fiction and illusion; a representation must be examined as a representation before being reduced to a real fact. And the memory of a shoot must be confronted with its materiality.
The interview then goes well beyond the Romance case alone. It runs through #MeToo, censorship, cultural morality, Baise-moi, Iran, the actresses she admires, festivals, writing, Pialat, Deneuve, Ardant, Binoche, Godrèche, Madonna, Campbell, Huppert, Rocancourt, the stroke, and the intact desire for cinema. But its center is first of all here: an accusation, a response, and the evidence.
Video unavailableThe documents in the file: what they establish, what they do not prove
Before the interview, here is the starting point of our reading.
The screenplay of scene 35, titled "Paul’s Apartment / Stairs – Int. Night," already contains the acts that the book sometimes presents as a sudden shift on set: the cunnilingus, the brutality of the scene, the sodomy that was planned, the verbal violence of the man on the stairs. This document obviously does not settle the question of consent to a specific take. But it makes it impossible to present the scene as a narrative trap invented on the day itself.
The shooting schedule is even more decisive. It places the scene back into a material order. The "Paul’s Apartment / Stairs" section is scheduled before the block with Rocco Siffredi. Yet Ducey’s account, in the book as in the Nouvel Obs interview, rests on the opposite idea: Rocco first, the sense of having cleared the major ordeal, then the stairs. That emotional chronology may correspond to the order of the edited film or to a reconstructed memory. It does not correspond to the shooting schedule.
The testimonies, finally, force one out of the slogan. Even in the Libération article, very unfavorable to Breillat in its angle, several essential witnesses do not validate the idea of a scheme. They leave open a gray area — the possibility of a gesture out of frame, of pain, of shock — but they do not confirm the gravest hypothesis: that of a rape ordered by the director.
It is to this line that we hold in the pages that follow: to listen to Ducey, but not to turn a statement into proof when it contradicts the available documents. When it comes to sexual violence, rigor is never the enemy of victims. It is what allows one to distinguish responsibilities, narratives, facts, and accusations.
Interview with Catherine Breillat by Pierre-Antoine Tsady
I. The Ducey-Romance affair: the accusation tested against the evidence
The accusations made by Caroline Ducey in La Prédation
The starting point must be the accusation itself, in its strongest formulation. Only after presenting it fairly can one examine the evidence.
Pierre-Antoine Tsady: In La Prédation (Nom féminin), Caroline Ducey builds her accusation in several stages. In the chapter 2001: La chute ("2001: The Fall"), she writes: "A door suddenly opens onto my memory: a rape." Then, in 1998: Le tournage de Romance ("1998: The Shooting of Romance"), she returns to the scene known as "The Stranger on the Stairs," which she says was renamed "The Rape Scene" about an hour and a half before the take. She also reports that you allegedly asked her to remove her tights and underwear: "It’s a rape scene, it would be a shame if it weren’t believable because of a pair of panties." Finally, in La confrontation ("The Confrontation"), she asks you: "Are you aware that a rape was orchestrated against my person?" Before the dates, before the evidence, what precisely is your answer to this accusation?
Catherine Breillat: My first answer is that I do not contest her suffering. I have never contested it. That she is doing very badly, I do not doubt for a second. That she is deeply disturbed seems obvious to me [Caroline Ducey herself mentions in La Prédation, in the chapter 2001: La chute, a crack addiction starting in August 2001 and a forced withdrawal in February 2002, Ed.]. I sympathize with her distress and I have never wanted to take her to court. I certainly will not.
But acknowledging suffering does not mean acknowledging an accusation. These are two different things. What I contest is not her pain; it is the version she gives today of the stairwell scene. Above all, it is the responsibility she attributes to me in a crime.
She accuses me, today, of having organized a rape on the shoot of Romance, during the stairwell scene with the actor Reza Habouhossein. That accusation I formally contest. I contest it with the film, with the screenplay, with the shooting schedule, with the chronology, and with the testimonies.
Caroline made Romance. She brought her presence, her commitment to it. The film would not have existed without her. I do not want to erase any of that. But the facts must be looked at otherwise than through the prism of reconstructed memory, resentment, or a certain ideology.
Caroline’s suffering is not in dispute. What is in dispute are the facts.
P.-A. T.: To be very precise: Caroline Ducey does not only accuse you of having shot a sexually explicit scene. She says she was subjected, by surprise, to an oral-genital act during the first take of the stairwell scene. She writes in particular: "Something went in." Further on, she speaks of a cunnilingus suffered by surprise. Is that indeed what you contest?
C. B.: I contest the idea that I would have organized that. I contest the idea that it would have been prepared, wanted, requested, staged by me for the camera.
As for the gesture itself, I have never claimed to be inside Caroline’s body. It is quite possible that he slipped his tongue, without anyone on the set noticing. Indeed, Caroline herself describes this man as a "mere defective cog." The term suits me: it locates the failure in him, not in some organization I would have set up. But that does not make me the organizer of a rape. It does not turn a written, framed, supervised scene into a crime staged for the camera.
One must distinguish the levels. What Caroline says she felt is one thing. What the image shows is another. What the screenplay called for is yet another. And the accusation that I orchestrated a rape for the film is an accusation of a different nature. That is the one I absolutely reject.
Right of reply, media frenzy, and an incomplete file
P.-A. T.: You say you were implicated without being able to respond under satisfactory conditions. Whom did you contact?
C. B.: I wrote to Anne Diatkine, at Libération. I also wrote to Anna Topaloff, at Le Nouvel Obs. I asked for a right of reply. It was not granted to me, at least not under conditions that would have allowed me to respond freely.
At Le Nouvel Obs, a journalist had first called me about the book. I did not know the details of the accusations. So I could only deny them, without being able to make my case. I was stunned when I discovered the article. Had the grievances been laid out for me, I could have responded, with documents in hand.
I also wrote to Sandrine Rousseau, to be summoned to the National Assembly. I had been implicated there twice, in my absence. In these symbolic proceedings, the only ones absent are often those who are accused.
It all came out within a few days, at the end of August 2024: La Prédation, from Albin Michel; an interview in Le Nouvel Obs, written by Anna Topaloff; then an investigation in Libération, conducted by Anne Diatkine, who also appears in the book’s acknowledgments. Three pieces, one and the same media sequence, and accounts that do not always say the same thing.
I can take criticism. I can accept that my cinema be debated. But when the discussion is turned into a criminal accusation, one leaves criticism behind. And when the accused is denied the chance to explain, to contextualize, and to contradict, one enters into something else. Into something that resembles a Stalinist trial: the accused is judged in advance.
P.-A. T.: You say the affair goes beyond your case alone. Where do you locate what is at stake?
C. B.: What is at stake is not being for or against me. It concerns the place of women in cinema, the use of actresses’ bodies, the making of intimate scenes, the ethics of a set. These are real questions, contemporary questions, and they deserve better than a hasty verdict.
But as soon as they are reduced to scandal, one prevents oneself from thinking. One stops looking at cinema. One replaces shots with slogans.
Romance before the affair: casting, trust, and the nature of the film
P.-A. T.: Let’s go back to Romance, before the affair. How was Caroline Ducey chosen? What were you looking for in the lead actress?
C. B.: I did screen tests with about two hundred candidates. Very beautiful girls — there are plenty who want to be actresses. Cinema is a fool’s paradise. Unlike the theater, it requires neither a diploma nor technique. But you have to be gifted: you have to know how to speak truly, to speak and not to act. Otherwise, the most beautiful one disfigures herself with falseness, to the point where you suffer for her.
I began with improvisations. By the end, ten were left. For those ten, it was a text: to say a text as if it were coming out of your lips at that very moment — that is the supreme test. I had chosen an excerpt from Parfait Amour (1996) [a Breillat film with Isabelle Renauld and Alain Soral, Ed.]. Just before that ultimate day of auditions, Caroline Ducey arrives.
She did not have the beauty of the others, she didn’t know how to dress. My producer didn’t find her beautiful. I, on the other hand, saw something in her: a grace in the cheeks, in the eyelid, something of the Quattrocento. I told my producer: "I’m going to make her beautiful."
P.-A. T.: There was also Laure Marsac. Why did you choose Caroline Ducey over her?
C. B.: I forbade myself from preferring one or the other, because both could be my character. With Laure, it would have become a different film. I’m not looking for products at the supermarket, but for unique beings.
The film involved unsimulated sexual acts. That is not something you reduce to a contract clause. It is a matter of trust, of awareness of the project, of a deep agreement with a role. Caroline accepted. Laure Marsac turned me down in a charming little letter, written in her own hand on blue paper. In it she said how much she loved the screenplay, but that she could not bring herself to do unsimulated sexual acts. So I took Caroline.
P.-A. T.: From the outset, was Romance meant to be a film where sex would be unsimulated, but inscribed in a cinematic approach rather than in a pornographic logic?
C. B.: A film in which the sex scenes would not be simulated was not, for me, a publicity argument, but a genuine intellectual principle. There is no reason to split the actors’ bodies in two: on one side, pornographic cinema, to which sex would be abandoned; on the other, a supposedly noble cinema that would keep only the head, speech, thought.
The contractual framework, for its part, was perfectly clear: Romance was not to be rated X. Otherwise, I would have had to repay the CNC’s advance on receipts, as well as Arte’s money. But within that limit, the acts could be real. And some of them were.
So when François Berléand finally opens the satin panties with little golden scissors, then inserts his fingers into Caroline’s sex, what one sees is real: his fingers come out wet. The scene with the medical students, real medical students, follows the same principle: each one in turn inserts two fingers into her. There again, it is not simulated. As for the scenes with Rocco Siffredi, two takes were shot without simulation.
The film fully owns up to this. It is neither a secret nor a scandal effect added after the fact: it is the very nature of the film that Caroline Ducey had agreed to make.
Consent to the film, consent to each gesture
P.-A. T.: Did Caroline Ducey, in your view, fully understand the nature of the film, in particular the presence of unsimulated sexual acts? And how do you distinguish the general agreement given to a film from precise consent to a gesture, a take, a concrete action?
C. B.: One must distinguish, yes. Accepting a film does not authorize just anything. Accepting an unsimulated scene does not mean that an actor can invent a gesture without your knowledge. I have never claimed otherwise. That is in fact exactly what may have happened with the partner on the stairs. Caroline could refuse at the last moment. The law allows it, and I would have taken it into account. She was an adult, of voting age for three years. I considered that she knew what she was doing.
But here, one must read. Caroline read the screenplay. She signed the contract. For the stairwell sequence, today at the center of the controversy, the text is explicit. It describes in plain words a cunnilingus and a sodomy. On the other hand, it does not call for a tongue inside the sex. That precise gesture, if it took place, was neither written, nor wanted, nor organized by me.
One must also read her own book. On page 133, in the chapter Mise au point ("Setting the Record Straight") of La Prédation (Albin Michel, 2024), she writes: "I agreed that the scene with Rocco Siffredi be unsimulated." On that same page, she also acknowledges having "given her agreement to serve the character of Marie and the stakes of this film." In this passage, she distinguishes the scene with Rocco from the stairwell scene. She calls the latter "The Rape Scene" and presents its unfolding as "very different."
It is written in black and white. Yet, that same month, she declares to Le Nouvel Obs: "I repeat, it was never a question of the sex scenes not being simulated!" To my eyes, those two statements cannot stand together.
P.-A. T.: You often describe the shooting of Romance as a "state of grace." That word may seem strange in the current context. What do you mean concretely?
C. B.: The film was made in a very great symbiosis with Caroline. One could speak of "hold" ("emprise"), if by that one means the hold of the role and of the film itself. The whole set is under the hold of the film. The actor is under the hold of his character. To be an actor is a profession: to strip oneself of one’s own identity, to give one’s body, one’s emotions, one’s voice, one’s face. It is not Caroline who sleeps with Rocco Siffredi: it is Marie, her character. This dissociation between the actress and the role is vital. No actor escapes it. That is what makes the profession so destabilizing.
Authority is of no use in this kind of work. If you impose something by command, you inhibit the actor or actress. You need trust, a kind of deep agreement. Between her and me, that understanding existed fully. There was no authority in the brutal sense of the term, but a grace of work. I even have a letter from her in which she says how exhilarating the shoot had been. By the end, our relationship was excellent.
I always wait for the "magic take": the one where the actor forgets himself and becomes the other. Often it’s the fourteenth. With Caroline, one or two takes were enough. That was the state of grace.
The stairwell scene: what the screenplay wrote
P.-A. T.: Let’s come to the heart of the accusation. Caroline Ducey writes that the scene of "The Stranger on the Stairs" was renamed "The Rape Scene" shortly before shooting. She also reports your line about the panties. What did that term cover on the set: a dramatic indication, an assistant’s shorthand, or a real modification of the planned scene?
C. B.: The scene is in the screenplay. It is written. It is not a scene invented at the last minute.
On the call sheet, distributed the day before, my assistant summarized the action. He may have written "rape scene" on it. But that summary dated from the day before, not from the last moment. It changed neither a word nor the scene that Caroline already had in hand.
In the screenplay, it is a prostitution scene. The character’s line, "A hundred bucks just to suck you off," gives its logic. That line belongs to the exterior element of the scene, shot separately, then edited together with the interior scene. That is what was planned: a prostitution scene, not a rape scene organized for the camera.
What I contest is the slippage. One can say that a scene is violent, disturbing, brutal, that it carries a symbolic charge of rape. But that does not mean that a real rape was staged. There is here a confusion of words that turns into an accusation.
P.-A. T.: The screenplay, in scene 35, nonetheless describes very explicit acts: cunnilingus, masturbation, brutal sodomy. How was that writing understood on the set?
C. B.: As cinematic writing. Crude, yes. Head-on, yes. But written. It is not a surprise that sprang up an hour earlier.
The scene had to produce something very harsh, very hieratic. I did not want a naturalistic outburst. I wanted a shot that had almost the fixity of a painting, with a cold violence. That is why, when I am accused of having organized a rape in order to film it, I answer first with the screenplay and the frame. What is written is not what is told today as an absolute surprise.
There is also a craft reason. A real rape would be an improvisation. But improvisation forbids the fixed shot, the constructed lighting, the tracking shot. It would impose a handheld camera, a focus pulled on the fly. The whole crew would be its immediate witness. A rape "organized for the camera" is therefore a technical contradiction.
The alleged gesture, the off-screen, and responsibility for the apparatus
P.-A. T.: In her account, Caroline Ducey writes: "Something went in." She then explicitly qualifies the act as rape, speaking of a cunnilingus suffered by surprise. Is your position to say that this gesture did not take place, or that it may have taken place outside your perception and outside the frame?
C. B.: I say that it may have taken place without anyone seeing it. That is possible. But if it took place, it took place outside the visible apparatus, outside the perception of the crew, outside what the camera could record.
The camera was placed behind the actor. It does not see through his skull. It can see neither the lips nor the tongue. Yet the gesture Caroline speaks of today is exactly of that order: possible, perhaps, but invisible to the frame. You cannot organize, for a camera, what the camera cannot capture.
P.-A. T.: Your answer therefore does not consist only in saying: "I saw nothing." You also say that the accusation, in its form, "to organize a rape for the needs of a scene," does not hold up technically. But a director remains responsible for the apparatus she creates. Where do you locate your responsibility?
C. B.: I am responsible for my apparatus. I am responsible for the screenplay I wrote, for the frame I chose, for the scene I shot, for the way I edited it. I am not dodging.
But being responsible for an apparatus does not mean being responsible for a gesture that I neither requested, nor saw, nor could film. If that gesture took place, it escaped the apparatus. It does not fulfill it; it betrays it.
That is what I want people to understand. I do not oppose Caroline with a cold legal impossibility. I say: look at the film, look at the camera position, look at the shot. The accusation of a rape organized for the camera presupposes that the camera could see that rape. Yet it could not.
As for the sodomy called for by the scene, Caroline Ducey herself writes that "it did not go that far." In my view, on screen, that part is simulated: the actor was not holding his erection, and this had to be masked through performance, framing, and editing.
Order of the film, order of the shoot: what the shooting schedule changes
P.-A. T.: In La Prédation, the account seems to follow the order of the edited film: Rocco Siffredi, then a kind of letting go, then the stairwell scene. You claim that the real order of the shoot is the reverse. What exactly does the final April 10, 1998 shooting schedule show?
C. B.: In the film, yes, Rocco comes before the stairs. But a film is not shot in the order in which it is edited. That is the whole problem. Caroline tells the order of the film as if it were the order of the shoot. Yet the shooting schedule shows the opposite.
One has to start again from the making. Cinema is illusion, but the shoot is also time, and shooting time is money. To save time, and therefore to stay within budget, you gather the maximum number of sets in a single place. That is why you do not shoot in the order of the screenplay, but by blocks of sets.
You begin with the studio, because each day the studio is occupied and each day the sets are built are billed. Monday, April 13, is devoted to the prelight: in the studio, you can already set up a general lighting orientation on the ceiling equipped for it, then refine it shot by shot at the moment of shooting. In the evening, Caroline Ducey, my first assistant Michaël Weill, whom the set called Miko, and I sleep at the hotel in Arpajon.
Shooting begins on Tuesday, April 14, in Arpajon, in a single studio. That is the essential point: one must not read each set as a different real location. I sum up this concentration in a formula that avoids the confusion of reading the shooting schedule: seven days of studio shooting, three sets, a single studio. The studio concentrates Robert’s apartment, the set for the fantasy of the "House of Rendezvous," then the set linked to the stairs of Paul’s apartment.
Robert’s apartment is built in Arpajon on a soundstage. The crew stays there five days, until Saturday, April 18. There we shoot sequences 30A, 30B, and 39.
Between this first week and the next, given the subject of the film, the production has the actors involved in the sex scenes take HIV tests: the porn actors from the fantasy known as "the woman cut in two," but also Reza Habouhossein and Caroline Ducey.
On Monday, April 20, D6, Reza Habouhossein is indeed called on the shooting schedule. He appears on D6, D7, and D8, credited as "Stairs Man," role 5. But he does not shoot with Caroline that day. The crew shoots the fantasy of the woman cut in two at the "House of Rendezvous," another studio set. We also shoot an insert [a detail shot filmed separately and added in the edit, Ed.] linked to the white-dress scene with Robert [François Berléand, Ed.]: a cutaway of a finger in Caroline’s vagina. That insert is done by another porn actor, not by Reza. Reza, for his part, is present in case the crew finishes earlier, and to meet Caroline before the stairwell scene.
The scene known as the stairwell scene is sequence 35 in the screenplay. On the shooting schedule, it appears under the labels 35B and 35R. It belongs to the fictional set "Paul’s Apartment / Stairs."
The interior of the stairwell was reconstructed in the studio, because an apartment-building stairwell is a common area. You could not shoot a prostitution scene in a real stairwell while preventing people from passing. So the actor shoots with Caroline in that reconstructed interior.
The "Paul’s Apartment / Stairs" block is spread over two days: sequence 35B is scheduled on Tuesday, April 21, D7; sequence 35R on Wednesday, April 22, D8. On Tuesday the 21st, we shoot the beginning of the scene. That is the part that is debated today. On Wednesday the 22nd, we shoot 35R. It is that day that Reza crosses paths with Sagamore Stévenin on the set.
The exterior of Paul’s stairs is yet another thing. The line "A hundred bucks just to suck you off" belongs to that exterior. It is not spoken in the contested interior part. That exterior is shot in Paris, outside the studio, probably in the 16th arrondissement. In the edit, the reconstructed interior and the separately shot exterior become a single continuity.
One must also distinguish this from the real Paul’s apartment, located in the 8th arrondissement. There too, what the film presents as a continuous place is fabricated: the real apartment is much larger, the bathroom is fake, the kitchen background is set decoration. That is the magic of cinema. The viewer believes he sees a single scene, a single apartment, a single place. The shooting schedule, for its part, shows the real making.
And Rocco, now. The very evening of Tuesday, April 21, after that first day of the stairwell block, we go to dinner at the hotel in Arpajon. There are Caroline, Michaël Weill, the producer Jean-François Lepetit, Rocco, and me. Neither Caroline nor I had met Rocco before. He spends the whole evening talking about his Oscars in the porn world, in approximate French. It is cheerful. And this happens a few hours after the scene that Caroline describes today as a rape I supposedly organized.
The scenes with Paolo, alias Rocco Siffredi, only begin on Thursday, April 23, with the meeting in the bar on rue de Grenelle. The block continues until Saturday, April 25, notably in Auvers-sur-Oise, in the "Paolo’s Apartment" set. One must distinguish that beginning of the block from the penetration scene with Rocco, the one Caroline writes on page 133 that she accepted unsimulated. It is shot, in my view, on Friday, April 24, three days after the contested part of the stairs.
There are two takes: the crudest is not kept in the edit; the other appears in the film. My editing choice says very well what I was looking for. I did not keep the crudest version. I kept the one where something else happens between them: a kind of carnal fusion, above all emotion. When you really look at the scene, the gaze is not seized by the crotch. It goes toward the faces. Romance is a very hieratic, very constructed film. The camera always returns to the face. It is not a film that shows; it is a film that looks.
This is what the shooting schedule establishes: the stairwell scene is shot before Rocco. The unsimulated scene that Caroline says she accepted comes afterward. It therefore cannot serve as a psychological threshold before the stairs. What the book presents as a progression rests on the order of the edit, not on the order of the shoot. And here, it is the order of the shoot that settles the matter.
P.-A. T.: You yourself had nonetheless long spoken of the "last day of studio," notably in your book of interviews with Murielle Joudet (a journalist at Le Monde and France Culture). So you are correcting your own memory?
C. B.: Yes. I am correcting it because I found the shooting schedule. It is unambiguous. The last day of the "Robert’s Apartment / Living Room" block is Saturday, April 18. That day, we shoot sequence 39 among others.
The stairwell scene belongs to another fictional set: "Paul’s Apartment / Stairs." That set includes, in particular, a stairwell interior reconstructed in the studio, then an exterior shot separately. Twenty-seven years later, I may have confused the last day of a studio block with the stairwell scene. What matters is not my imprecise memory, it is the documents.
Witnesses, the "mouchard," and the technical crew
P.-A. T.: The Libération investigation collected several voices from the crew: Yorgos Arvanítis, Michaël Weill, Claire Monatte, Jean-François Lepetit. Some elements seem to support you, others to put you in difficulty. So that the reader understands, let’s go through them precisely. What do you take from these testimonies?
C. B.: Yorgos Arvanítis, my cinematographer, says in this investigation that he would have left the set had he perceived a rape. That is true, and he is telling the truth. He is a puritan, I know it. He would not have lasted an instant.
Jean-François Lepetit, the producer, confirms that the contract excluded the X rating and that he never heard me explicitly request the unsimulated. There are two testimonies that fit with my version.
That leaves Claire Monatte, the makeup artist. On what she saw, I believe her. She accurately describes Caroline’s regressive attitude after the takes, the thumb in the mouth, the knees of a technician. That is true. I saw it too.
Where I contest is on the remark she attributes to the first assistant. According to that remark, Caroline was to be taken "without her knowledge," and I wanted to "film the gaze, not the act." That phrasing is false. Caroline had read and signed the screenplay. The scene is written there explicitly: cunnilingus, sodomy. She could not have been taken "without her knowledge" in the sense that the action would have been absent from the screenplay.
And Claire Monatte herself actively took part in preparing the scenes. She did the makeup. She injected the egg white into Caroline’s vagina for the second scene with Berléand, shot later. One does not take part with that level of technical intimacy in an apparatus one perceives as an organized rape. One resigns. One raises the alarm. One leaves the set. Claire Monatte obviously did none of that.
The first assistant in question is Michaël Weill. He confirms nothing of the sort in the same investigation. The remark reported by Monatte is indirect, reconstructed twenty-five years later.
Finally, the script supervisor, Séverine Sio, was at the camera position. She keeps the mouchard [the daily report that records incidents, interruptions, or anomalies on a set, Ed.]. If an incident had been perceived as such by the crew, it should have appeared in the mouchard and forced an interruption of the shoot. Yet I have no trace of such a stop. That does not prove what Caroline personally felt; it contradicts the idea of a visible, assumed, organized rape on the set.
The other contested scenes: Berléand, the red dress, and the egg white
P.-A. T.: Beyond the stairs, your detractors also mention a real digital penetration with François Berléand. What does the shooting apparatus say on this point?
C. B.: There are two different scenes with Robert [played by François Berléand, Ed.], and one must distinguish them, because the articles systematically confuse them.
The first is the white-dress scene, shot on the fourth day of shooting, in the studio. That day, Berléand did not want to do the gesture. It was his choice as an actor, perfectly respected. Caroline held it perfectly, she saved the scene. As I told you, it was another actor who came, a porn actor, to do the insert. A very brief shot of the gesture alone, in an entirely different moment.
The scene Caroline describes in Le Nouvel Obs is not that one. It is the second scene with Robert, in the red dress [inspired by In the Realm of the Senses (1976) by Nagisa Ōshima, Ed.]. It is shot later, after several days of working together. The white-dress scene had already taken place: in it Caroline cries, then laughs like a child, and Berléand is left stunned. Trust had fully set in. That time, he agreed. He really penetrated Caroline with his fingers, not one but two, and they come out glistening on screen. The moisture is obtained with an egg white that Claire Monatte, the makeup artist, injected with a large syringe just before the take.
P.-A. T.: Caroline Ducey nonetheless writes that she "tricked" by positioning her legs "a certain way." She says she faked the penetration to make the director believe she was performing it. How do you read that?
C. B.: One simply watches the film. Caroline is fitted with a steel spreader bar. She cannot in any way position her legs otherwise. That is information a serious investigation should have found. One cannot write that she tricked by positioning her legs. On screen, she absolutely cannot move them. That is where dossier journalism differs from accusation journalism: you only have to look at the film stock.
The successive versions of the accusation
P.-A. T.: You claim that the accusation changed its wording between 2022, 2023, and 2024. That is a serious point. What documents make it possible to establish this, and how can one avoid this argument being perceived as a way of disqualifying Caroline Ducey’s suffering?
C. B.: I do not say this to disqualify her suffering. I say it because an accusation must be precise, especially when it imputes a crime to someone.
There are, in this affair, three successive versions of the rape imputed to me. Each is different, with a different partner, over two years.
First version, in 2022. A journalist from IndieWire, on the occasion of the retrospective that New York was devoting to me, contacts Caroline. It is the first time she speaks on the subject. She claims then to have been raped during a scene that was not written. I have the emails between me, the journalist, and IndieWire. Yet scene 35, in its stage directions, is particularly crude. Cunnilingus and sodomy are described in plain words. The "scene not written" version falls apart.
Second version, in 2023. She goes to the Cinémathèque française to see its director, Frédéric Bonnaud. This time she maintains that she was raped by proxy: I supposedly tried, according to her, to make her sleep with Rocco Siffredi.
Third version, in 2024. It is no longer Rocco, it is the Iranian from the stairwell scene. It is that version that makes the cover of Le Nouvel Obs, and it is the one that has circulated since.
Three versions, three partners, in two years. These changes disturb me. When the Nouvel Obs article appears, I no longer know precisely which rape Caroline accuses me of having knowingly organized.
After Romance: returns in front of the camera and the limits of interpretation
P.-A. T.: In La Prédation, in the chapter La guerre est déclarée ("War Is Declared"), Caroline Ducey also contests your memory of a short film for Venice. She writes that the two of you supposedly never saw each other again. You claim, on the contrary, that she came back in front of your camera. Why does this element seem important to you, and how far can it be interpreted?
C. B.: One must be careful. The fact that an actress comes back in front of a camera does not say everything about a relationship, nor about what she feels deep down. I do not use it to cancel her suffering.
But it is a fact. In that chapter, she places our confrontation in 2012. She then writes that she never acted in a short film under my direction. She even adds: "We never saw each other again." Yet my segment for Venezia 70 – Future Reloaded is presented in Venice on August 28, 2013. And Caroline appears in it. One recognizes her on screen.
And before that, she had come back for Une vieille maîtresse. She can say it was only a cameo, that she does not call it work; but she was there, in front of my camera. If Romance had made any working relationship impossible, why agree to come back for Une vieille maîtresse? Why then appear in the Venice short film? These are simple facts. They do not necessarily say everything, but they contradict the idea of a total break.
Video unavailableThe 2012 confrontation according to Caroline Ducey
P.-A. T.: Speaking precisely of that confrontation, to which Caroline Ducey devotes an eponymous chapter in La Prédation: in it she recounts coming to your home in the spring of 2012 to ask you about your "degree of awareness" at the moment of the stairwell scene. The account dwells at length on your home. The actress describes your basement as "a huge room with white walls" and, on a large table, "like a great treasure laid out": "art objects, porcelain, books, miniatures, lamps, tableware, table linen." She then observes "this beautiful villa, nestled in this tiny paradise" and wonders: "Can being too rich harm one’s mental and physical health?" Above all, she describes you physically, after the stroke, in terms of great harshness: "’Let’s go drink tea in the garden!’ Breillat suddenly chirps. She climbs the steps with the slowness of an old bitch." At the moment she puts her question to you in person about the orchestration of the rape, she finally claims to have made you cry: "She sobs like a hysteric, harping on the same words." What is your version of this visit, and what do you answer to the portrait the actress paints of you in this chapter?
C. B.: No. There was no confrontation, not in the sense she recounts. This victim-theatricality turns a disagreement into the primal scene of a crime. That is not what happened.
What I reproached her for was something else. Caroline constantly wanted to take my place: to rewrite the film, the screenplay, even the mise-en-scène. When I learned that she claimed to have rewritten Romance, I took her up on it very sharply. The falling-out was born from that, not from the account she composes today.
The most striking thing is that for a long time I did not know which "rape" she was talking about. As early as 2006, she confusedly evoked something, without ever naming it. I did not hear an accusation in it. I heard a fear, a panic, the bewilderment around a scene she dreaded. There may be a root of the harm there: a real distress, then recomposed, displaced, mythologized.
What I contest is the fable she has drawn from it. Life is not a rape. A shoot is not a novel one rewrites twenty years later to give oneself the good role. A film is made with facts: rushes, texts, bodies, gazes, and the concrete truth of what was shot.
The crash after a role: an actor’s "baby blues"
P.-A. T.: You say the relationship with Caroline Ducey broke off after the exaltation of Romance. You speak of an actor’s "baby blues." How can one avoid this idea being understood as a way of psychologizing her accusation?
C. B.: One must not confuse the two. I am not saying: she accuses me because she supposedly had a baby blues. That would be grotesque and unjust. I am talking about a phenomenon I understood later: when a film is made in grace, there can be a crash afterward. The actor has given his body, his identity, his emotions to the character. Afterward, one must come back to oneself.
I did not pay attention to that moment of crash after the shooting of Romance. During the editing, I no longer saw her, because I was too absorbed. And when I understood that our paths were diverging, it was too late.
It was with L’Été dernier (2023) that I identified this mechanism more clearly. Samuel Kircher, who was seventeen when he made the film, went through something of that order. But he is in a very structured family of actors. The Kirchers are theater people, people who know what a role is, an exit from a role, a profession.
To be an actor is dangerous. You feel emotions that are not yours, of a mad intensity. You give your body to a character and afterward you must regain your own body. It is very complex.
II. Romance: a return to the work
From French scandal to international reception
P.-A. T.: Until now, we have talked about the facts, the shoot, and what replayed itself afterward. I would now like to come back to the work itself. Romance had a paradoxical international destiny: a scandal in France, an "intellectual" film elsewhere. What did that ambivalence teach you?
C. B.: It went everywhere in the world, but as an intellectual film. American journalists would say to me in New York: "But for what audience did you make this film?" And I would answer them: "For no audience. For myself."
Do not for a moment think that this is arrogance. It is integrity. I am an artist. I am not a popular director seeking an immense audience. Van Gogh did not cut off his ear so that Sotheby’s could make a profit. It is because he cut off his ear that Sotheby’s makes a profit.
And it is precisely because I made Romance only for myself that the film was watched worldwide. Even though it is icy and not at all erotic, a word I detest. Romance is not a provocation: it is a quest for sexual identity, almost a quest for the Grail, in which the heroine advances from ordeal to ordeal toward knowledge of herself. And above all, it defeated every censorship in the world.
I am happy to have made the cover of Art Press with this film, the magazine of Catherine Millet, whom I admire.
III. Cinema, morality, and the freedom of actresses
Judith Godrèche and Benoît Jacquot: "you cannot rewrite history"
P.-A. T.: On the Judith Godrèche and Benoît Jacquot affair, you have a distinctive opinion. What is it?
C. B.: First, I sincerely pity her. I was myself Benoît Jacquot’s companion. It was an absolute passion, but also a very trying experience. Our relationship lasted about three months. I know him, and I acknowledge that, for a girl of fourteen, it may have been difficult.
Now, what I say — and I know it shocks — is that there were people who could have prevented it: her parents. At fourteen, you do not protect yourself alone from a man of forty. It is the parents who must step in. Later, they accepted her emancipation before she was eighteen. [The emancipation of a minor is possible from age 16. It grants a civil capacity close to that of an adult. Judith Godrèche is the daughter of a psychoanalyst and a psychomotor therapist, Ed.]. That is not a detail. It is a legal act. As Françoise Giroud had done so that her daughter could marry Robert Hossein at fifteen.
One can say it was another era, libertarian. But you cannot rewrite history: you must always put things back in their context. And if there were people who should have stepped in, it was the parents. It was not up to Serge Toubiana, then head of the Cahiers du cinéma, to go file a complaint at the police station.
By the way, I notice that the program Thé ou Café, hosted by Catherine Ceylac, was taken off the internet. Judith Godrèche spoke on it, radiant, three years after her breakup with Jacquot. I saw it in full. She said, in substance: "I was fourteen. No one could have prevented me from getting into a relationship with him." And she added, about the hold: "But such an inspiring hold. He was so intelligent."
One has the right to change one’s mind at fifty. That earlier statement does not disqualify her suffering today. But it exists. It is on film. One cannot pretend it was never said.
With Bertolucci and Maria Schneider: Last Tango in Paris seen from the inside
P.-A. T.: You and your sister, the actress Marie-Hélène Breillat, took part in the shooting of Last Tango in Paris. The scene in which you appeared was ultimately cut in the edit, but your presence on the set remains: you saw Bernardo Bertolucci, the crew, Maria Schneider at work. Now that Maria, the film by Jessica Palud released in 2024, has brought this story back to the forefront, what can you say — with the caution of someone who was not at the heart of the scene, but was indeed on the shoot — about what you saw at the time and about the scene that has become so controversial?
C. B.: I spent fifteen days on the shoot, with my sister. We ran an antiques shop in the film. Our dialogue had been written by Agnès Varda, who had infused it with her One Sings, the Other Doesn’t side. Lines like "marriage, no thanks for me" or "when I’m pushing up daisies."
Bertolucci cut everything. I shot for fifteen days for nothing, not even having met Marlon Brando. But I learned a lot. It was Bertolucci who taught me how to shoot. When you watch The Conformist again, you are stunned by the fluidity and the intelligence. He is a very great director.
On the famous butter scene: the next day, Maria was perfectly fine. What Bertolucci had invented, the butter, was not in the screenplay. But the relationship on the floor, yes: that was the very synopsis of the film. The butter was a metaphor. I do not think she was raped.
What is said about Bertolucci today is instrumentalized. Perhaps today one could no longer shoot that scene. But that is because the era is backward. And I knew Maria. She never held it against Bertolucci. The only thing she held against him was not having paid her better when the film met with success.
Maria was a lost child. Her father, Daniel Gélin, did not want to recognize her. And she was a very good actress.
Maruschka Detmers, Maria Schneider, Pasolini: when persecution turns the story around
P.-A. T.: You say that some actresses are sometimes publicly stigmatized for scenes they had accepted. According to you, they then end up reformulating their own story under the effect of that persecution. That is a strong thesis. How do you explain it?
C. B.: Look at Maruschka Detmers: she was persecuted her whole life for the fellatio she had agreed to perform in Devil in the Flesh. Look also at what was done to Maria Schneider at the restaurant: people would put butter on the table for her. They are often the same people, or at least the same type of people, who today drape themselves in virtue.
When you are persecuted for what you did, for what you chose to do, a turnaround can happen. In the end, you say it was forced on you. That is the mechanism. You only have to watch Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom to understand how persecution can produce that turnaround.
Juliette Binoche, Léa Seydoux, Fanny Ardant, Catherine Deneuve: "real people"
P.-A. T.: Among actresses, which ones do you admire today? Not only for their talent, but for what they embody of the profession and of freedom?
C. B.: Juliette Binoche is an immense actress. I hold her in high esteem. She has been through things, I know it. She speaks of them in her own way, without personal accusation. She does not settle the profession through litigation. Many actresses have had good reasons to invoke their trauma. Juliette decided otherwise. And above all, she does not attack cinema. On the contrary: she loves it. When you love cinema, you know it is an art and a difficult craft. To me, she is a far greater actress than many performers nonetheless celebrated by the profession.
Fanny Ardant, it’s the same: a wonderful woman, of extraordinary elegance and intelligence.
Catherine Deneuve too. What unites these three women is that they do not speak according to the prevailing mood. They do not repeat ready-made thinking. They have their own ideas, their own voice, their own freedom. They are real people.
P.-A. T.: One should also mention Léa Seydoux. She is your niece, but you insist first on her work as an actress. She did, moreover, act in Une vieille maîtresse. What do you admire in her, precisely?
C. B.: Léa stands out. It is very simple: among the actresses of her generation, she has something apart. She is not interchangeable. She has a presence, an opacity, a way of speaking.
I greatly enjoyed working with her on Une vieille maîtresse, even though it was a small role. A small role is never small when someone truly exists on screen. Léa already existed.
Deneuve, Le Monde, Libération, Brigitte Lahaie, Catherine Millet around the "freedom to importune"
P.-A. T.: In January 2018, you said you could have signed the Le Monde op-ed. It defended a "freedom to importune, indispensable to sexual freedom." It was co-signed by Catherine Deneuve [this controversy also came up in our interview with Sophie de Menthon]. A few days later, in Libération, Deneuve maintained her signature. She also apologized to the victims hurt by the text. In hindsight, what should one take from this episode? The phrasing, the controversy, or the debate it sought to open?
C. B.: I hold some of the signatories in esteem, in particular Catherine Millet, Brigitte Lahaie, and Catherine Deneuve. I never thought the latter was defending violence or harassment. She was right to say so clearly again in her text in Libération. She did not withdraw her signature: she maintained the substance of her position. She also apologized to the victims who might have felt hurt by the op-ed. Those who had attacked her knew very well that she was defending neither violence nor harassment. They put her on trial for her intentions. She was certainly talking about something else: the complexity of desire, freedom, the trouble between people. On substance, she was right to open that debate.
On the other hand, the phrase "freedom to importune" was unfortunate. Too blunt, almost provocative, and in such an electric climate it could only be taken literally. When you go against the venom of an era, you need absolute precision: the word must be unassailable. Otherwise, the phrase becomes the subject and everything else disappears.
What strikes me is that this whole episode ended up being reduced to Catherine Deneuve and to that single expression. People stopped looking at the broader question it raised. They wanted to make it a symbol. Catherine Millet, for her part, held her line. Deneuve, for hers, was keen to clarify her own and to distance herself from certain remarks made afterward by other signatories.
Behind all this there is a moral tightening that worries me. We are the homeland of Musset, of Marivaux, of amorous banter, of assumed ambiguity. Should we now expurgate literature of everything that is not perfectly hygienic? Ban No Trifling with Love? Desire is not an administrative form: it carries trouble, risk, the unforeseen. That too is what this petition defended.
Video unavailableFeminism, consent, representations: the fault line
P.-A. T.: You draw a very clear distinction between the fight against violence and a broader temptation toward moral control. Where do you locate, today, the real fault line: in the acts themselves, or in the will to police representations?
C. B.: For me, feminism does not rhyme with puritanism, quite the contrary! You do what you want sexually. Consent, of course, is important; I do not contest it for a second. But the puritanism conveyed by part of the current movements worries me deeply. Puritanism is even, to my eyes, a tool for the enslavement of women. A puritan I am, I know it. But I do not see it as a virtue: rather as a wound, the culture of shame and taboo. It is that shame that Romance sought to exorcise.
Cinema is an art of fiction and illusion. But that distinction is never enough to dispense with the question of the shoot. When a scene represents sexual violence, two things must be examined at once: what the film shows and what really happened at the moment of the take. A rape is a crime; its representation is not. Still, one must verify that the representation has not covered up a real, non-consensual gesture. That is precisely why I refer back to the screenplay, the frame, the shooting schedule, and the testimonies.
I see developing a temptation to control not the acts, but the representations. Not only "what you do," but "what you show," "what you tell," "what you film." And when you want to draw up lists of what is showable and what is no longer, you are no longer in justice. The same goes when you want to decide who has the right to film what. You are in punitive morality.
P.-A. T.: You see in what is abusively called the #MeToo movement in France a drift toward censorship. What exactly are you talking about?
C. B.: I do not condemn #MeToo. I distinguish the indispensable liberation of victims’ speech from another phenomenon: a way, sometimes, of treating cinema as a permanent piece of evidence. There, the risk is no longer to listen to victims; it is to replace the investigation with a grid of reading already written. Journalists have thus solicited my actress Roxane Mesquida, on several occasions, to accuse me. She has always refused.
P.-A. T.: And why is auteur cinema, in your view, the privileged target?
C. B.: Because it is the one that carries weight. Look at who is attacked. André Téchiné, vilified for having brushed the hand of an actor who had been courting him assiduously for two years. He said to him: "You trouble me." Jacquot. Bertolucci, dead for eight years, instrumentalized to reinvent what really happened on Last Tango. Me, accused of having organized a rape.
It is never commercial cinema that is attacked. And it is not the industrial pornography, which I find vile, that concentrates the public trials. It is degrading and humiliating for women; but what people want to lock down today is not that industry, it is thought, it is the author.
Because, however small it may be, auteur cinema revolutionizes society. Sometimes it leads it. That is why it is violently attacked: because it challenges, because it thinks, because it disturbs.
P.-A. T.: You link this offensive to an older battle, that of authors’ rights. In what way?
C. B.: In France, authors’ rights are a human right. It is the heritage of Beaumarchais, of Balzac, of Victor Hugo. In our country, it is the author of the film who receives the Palme d’Or. In the United States, the Oscar goes to the producer, that is to say to the financier. The artist there is an employee: he does not have final cut. That is what is at play behind the attack: replacing the author with copyright. A member of parliament, Erwann Balanant, would like to legislate in that direction [Erwann Balanant, a MoDem member of parliament, took part in the parliamentary work on violence in cinema, Ed.]. The film would become a collective work, and a beginning actress could direct the shoot. I have no contempt for actors. But they do not make the film: they are made within it.
P.-A. T.: You go so far as to speak of fundamentalism. Is that a turn of phrase, or do you really think it is one?
C. B.: I weigh the word. Fundamentalism begins when a just cause becomes an instrument of control. I am not talking about #MeToo as victims’ speech. I am talking about those who use it to turn every work into an accusation file.
What worries me is this will to police images, bodies, fictions. In the end, one no longer judges a film: one suspects it.
I felt it very early. In 2001, I was already saying to Le Monde that we were heading toward a regression. A regression that "will know very well how to absorb the porn industry, but will want to crush everything that disturbs and challenges." Here we are.
IV. Writing, filming, surviving French cinema
The interview leaves here the terrain of controversy to return to the making of films: screenplays, alliances, closed doors, and the loyalties of a filmmaker who writes.
"I’m the one who wrote Police" — and not Maurice Pialat
P.-A. T.: After censorship and representations, let’s come back to the craft of writing for cinema. In the credits of Police (1985), you are credited for the original idea and for the writing, alongside Maurice Pialat, Sylvie Danton, and Jacques Fieschi. How did that collaboration begin? What was Pialat looking for in you?
C. B.: At first, Maurice loved me very much. He wanted to adapt a text about incest, with Isabelle Huppert. I was writing the screenplay for it. He followed me everywhere, like a puppy, would go pick up my son Hadrien from school. Then, at some point, Maurice did what he often did: he became a bit violent, he started to disillusion me.
He had told me: "We’re going to screen Tapage nocturne, and if I don’t like the film…" The implication: I repudiate you. But he saw the film, and he was absolutely captivated. He started telling Gaumont that he did not understand why I wasn’t being produced.
Then he wanted to make a popular film, with Depardieu and Sophie Marceau. It became Police, which was first called L’Étreinte ("The Embrace").
P.-A. T.: When you say you wrote Police, what exactly are you claiming in that writing work?
C. B.: What I claim is to have written the essential of it, without any doubt. Maurice did not write a single line of Police. The only one who wrote anything was Fieschi: the final scene. For all the rest, I did a total immersion. I went into police stations, into the drug world, around the Tunisian heroin scene. I also went into the territorial brigades, which were absolutely unknown at the time. I even had the love letters of the real character of Noria. I invented nothing.
The cops talked like in Touchez pas au grisbi, in an outdated slang. That is how I had written their dialogue. Maurice, furious, wanted them to address the suspects formally at the station. Depardieu reinstated the familiar form: with his actor’s instinct, he understood that it was grotesque to use the formal "vous."
Sale comme un ange ("Dirty Like an Angel") is the first version of that screenplay, the one Pialat threw in my face. I then directed it myself, with Brasseur and Lio. Maurice would appropriate things: he even took the title À nos amours from a Série noire novel I was adapting.
With Depardieu and Sophie Marceau, it was "a men’s film"
P.-A. T.: You rewatched Police recently. What, with time, no longer holds up? And what resists despite everything?
C. B.: It does not hold up. Marceau is good in the film. But Pialat wanted to make it a men’s film. So Sophie Marceau did not find her place in it.
Depardieu reportedly said on Guillaume Durand’s show that I was "a real intellectual." I did not know it. He happens to see clearly despite his flaws.
Toscan du Plantier, Isabelle Huppert, and "the closed doors"
P.-A. T.: You say that Daniel Toscan du Plantier long blocked your path, notably around 36 fillette. What does that reveal about power in French cinema at the time?
C. B.: Toscan did absolutely everything so that I would not make 36 fillette. I was blocked, struck off. He went and gave an interview in the New York Times, at Unifrance Films’ expense, on the Concorde. In it he said that the New York Festival had made an "enormous mistake" in selecting me. And that I was not representative of French cinema.
Toscan du Plantier, then president of Unifrance, was one of the most powerful figures in French cinema. Foolishly, I took it as a point of pride. Which made me turn other directors against me.
P.-A. T.: And Isabelle Huppert, who counts a great deal in your career: what role did she play, behind the scenes?
C. B.: She defended me a great deal with Toscan. She tried to reason with him, to make him accept that Gaumont support my films. She is someone who, behind the scenes, was important to me.
36 fillette: French hatred, Michel Ciment as a counterpoint
P.-A. T.: You say that 36 fillette aroused a "total hatred." What was that hatred made of: the film, or what it forced people to look at?
C. B.: Total. After 36 fillette, it was certain that I could no longer make a film in France. A female critic, in a major newspaper, had called Delphine Zentout, who was sublime and acted extremely well at sixteen, a "repugnant monster." While commenting on her chest. It is often women who are the most ferocious.
I was extremely wounded by it. Because it sent me back to my own experience. When you have a chest at twelve, people (sometimes those close to you) look at you differently: you are sexualized, and it is very violent.
P.-A. T.: And Michel Ciment reversed, you say, the international destiny of the film at Cannes?
C. B.: Yes. He did not like me a priori. But when he read the review in question, he was outraged. He asked his press officer to come and apologize to me on behalf of the critics.
And then, at Cannes, the film was in no selection. It was screening only at the Market. [The Marché du Film is the professional space of the Cannes Film Festival. Films are shown there to distributors, sellers, and programmers, Ed.]. Ciment walked up and down the Croisette. To every festival director, he said: "There is only one film this year, and it is in no selection."
The first screening was empty. The second, packed. The film then went around the planet. It sold in every country in the world, except Costa Rica.
Brad Pitt, Zhang Yimou, Verhoeven, Kieślowski, Angelopoulos: behind the scenes of the Mostra
P.-A. T.: Your festival memories also cross those of world cinema. Angelopoulos, Kieślowski, Verhoeven, Zhang Yimou, Brad Pitt… In Istanbul as at the Venice Mostra, you sat on the jury. What do you take from these encounters?
C. B.: Istanbul, at the time of 36 fillette. There are a lot of stupid people on this kind of jury, not deigning to watch the films, but there, I was with intelligent people. Angelopoulos, with whom I got along like a house on fire. Mikhalkov, who is very subtle. And then Kieślowski, who treated me with a contempt and a paternalism that I still have trouble forgiving him for. He had said to me: "You, obviously, you like everything." I had answered him: "No, I like nothing." Truly intelligent people do not despise you gratuitously.
At the Venice Mostra in 2007, chaired by Zhang Yimou, I argued in favor of Brad Pitt when his candidacy was up for debate. He finally received the Volpi Cup for best actor for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. In Venice, that year, it was with Paul Verhoeven that I got along best.
Naomi Campbell, Madonna: Breillat’s international aura
P.-A. T.: People have sometimes forgotten how much your cinema also attracted international figures. Naomi Campbell did screen tests for Bad Love at your home. And Madonna loved Romance.
C. B.: Professional actors sometimes have tics. Naomi Campbell, for her part, really wanted to work with me. I had her do screen tests, like everyone, and she was astonishing in them. Pure crystal. I kept the footage. We even walked up the steps together at Cannes.
Madonna loved Romance. She could have done Une vieille maîtresse, which I adapted from Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly. But I think she had not understood the title.
Stars are never told the truth. Naomi understood it very well. She was even ready, if Bad Love had been made, to shoot under conditions of austerity that many more established actresses would have refused.
Imamura and the Interview of Silence
P.-A. T.: In Japan, you met and interviewed the director Shōhei Imamura. You recount that scene like an apparition, almost unreal. How did that encounter unfold?
C. B.: It was Michel Ciment who had asked me to interview him in Japan, for Positif. For the Japanese, Imamura is a national treasure. He never traveled, but he accepted because he adored Michel Ciment.
We were waiting for him in the hotel lobby. And all of a sudden, I see a gentleman who did not come in through the right door. He was gliding across the floor, as if he were moving through the air. Something extraordinary, like Zen. I sensed it could only be him.
The interview was difficult. He was incensed against France, because he felt he had not been recognized at the level of his work. He was thinking in particular of Intentions of Murder (Akai satsui, 1964), his film that I had recently had reprogrammed. He met me with near-refusals. That is why I titled the article Interview of Silence.
And when we came back down, at the moment of saying goodbye, he says to me in French: "You know, I speak French!"
Iran, the films Baise-moi and Romance: one and the same battle against censorship
P.-A. T.: From your speech in Iran to your commitment to the film Baise-moi, one finds the same driving line. It also runs through the Australian and Swedish controversies around Romance. What, in your view, deeply connects these episodes?
[The film Baise-moi (2000), by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, had its exhibition visa annulled by the Council of State before being reclassified, Ed.].
C. B.: My speech in Iran, I wrote it before Romance. It was a talisman. It took me a month to write it. French is the language of diplomacy. I am neither an essayist nor a philosopher, but I wanted to be absolutely myself and uncompromising. The subject was already today’s: the place of women in cinema, the use of their bodies, the exploitation of actresses. In Iran, I said what I could not say in France in 1997. And, very curiously, what I can no longer say in France today, thirty years later.
For Baise-moi, I was outraged. A far-right jurist was bringing a lawsuit to have the film banned to those under eighteen. At the time, that concretely meant the X rating, that is to say commercial death. No one wanted to defend Baise-moi. Not because it was indefensible, but because no one wanted to expose themselves. So I wrote the petition all alone, in my kitchen.
When the text was published in Libération, I received faxes. When I came home, I had ten or fifteen meters of paper unrolled with names. The first to sign: Jacques Lanzmann and Jean-Luc Godard.
And for Romance: in Australia, I said to the journalists: "Fight." They did. Poll: the majority wanted to see the film. It was released uncensored. A triumph.
In Sweden, feminists chained themselves at the Stockholm festival to prevent a screening. Chained to stop people from seeing a film.
Stroke, Rocancourt, Abus de faiblesse: when vulnerability becomes a spectacle for certain media
P.-A. T.: After your stroke, still very weakened, you meet Christophe Rocancourt around Bad Love, written for Naomi Campbell. Then comes the swindle, recognized by the courts. And, later, the film Abus de faiblesse. This whole sequence turned an intimate fragility into a public affair. In hindsight, what hurt you most: the abuse itself, or the way your vulnerability was spied on?
C. B.: It all begins with my stroke. I was very weakened, hemiplegic, on medication, in a vulnerable state. And yet, I wanted to keep working, to keep making cinema. I was writing Bad Love for Naomi Campbell, and Rocancourt was to have a role in it. It was in that state that he entered my life.
The horrible Rocancourt affair… Of course, the abuse itself was terrible. But what perhaps hurt me even more was the way this story was looked at. I was violently attacked by part of the press, often with great brutality. I was the victim, as the courts later recognized, but the dominant narrative was that of "the intellectual who got taken in." There was an unhealthy glee in it. All the hatred accumulated against me, for my films and for my freedom of tone, found an outlet.
That cruel gaze also targeted the state the stroke had left me in: my dependence, my fragility, my afflicted body. Some rejoiced in it. A magazine ran a cover of staggering vulgarity. What struck me was the silence: almost no one was outraged. Not a single so-called feminist protested. Not one. I was very weakened, depressed. At that moment, yes, I felt a stranger in my own country.
There was, however, in September 2007, on Ruquier’s show, for Bad Love, a moment when I did not give in. The Zemmour and Naulleau duo received me with immense condescension. You could already see the hostile gaze that would later relentlessly pursue me. I did not let myself be reduced to the caricature they wanted to manufacture. That evening, I defended myself with determination. It mattered to me to show that I was still there, full of projects.
"They call me sulfurous, but it’s society that reeks"
P.-A. T.: Deep down, what does cinema allow you to be and to seek, at the most intimate level, that no other art would allow you?
C. B.: It is so boring not to be oneself.
I make films for myself. Out of an artist’s integrity. Because the only thing that interests me is to seek the truth. Not journalistic "truth"; emotional, carnal, philosophical truth. The one that passes through bodies before passing through words. Cinema is the only art that allows that: to show what cannot be said.
They call me sulfurous, but it’s society that reeks. I only look. And what I show is what society prefers not to see.
"I’m still here"
P.-A. T.: Today, is the desire to make another film still there?
C. B.: (Silence.) I won’t say too much. Projects protect themselves, especially in the current climate.
I write. Producers send me screenplays. Famous actresses and actors want to work with me.
It is not only my signature they come looking for. They demand my mise-en-scène. My gaze. What I do with a body, a face, a silence.
I have never stopped desiring cinema. And as long as a film can still call to me, nothing is over: I’m still here.
Catherine Breillat: selected works and milestones
Selected bibliography
Selected filmography
- 36 fillette (1988) — Adolescence as a territory of cruelty and desire.
- Romance (1999) — A pivotal film of explicit representation in European auteur cinema.
- À ma sœur ! (2001) — A modern tragedy on the violence of the social gaze.
- Anatomie de l’enfer (2004) — A philosophical variation on the male gaze.
- Une vieille maîtresse (2007) — Barbey d’Aurevilly reread through sensuality and stylization.
- Abus de faiblesse (2013) — Vulnerability and manipulation, with Isabelle Huppert facing Kool Shen.
- L’Été dernier (2023) — A masterful return, official selection at Cannes.
Chronological milestones
- 1948 — Birth.
- 1965 — L’Homme facile, a censored novel.
- 1988 — 36 fillette.
- 1999 — Romance.
- 2000 — Petition for Baise-moi.
- 2013 — Abus de faiblesse.
- 2023 — L’Été dernier.