Part of the fascination in your film comes from the process of discovery, from the way we, the audience, slowly get to know the face, the body, the gestures of Héloïse. How did you develop this process for yourself from a writer-director point of view?

At first, it was a quite a long process of writing. And with this I mean not writing per se, but more a dreaming. I came up with the idea right after GIRLHOOD, about five years ago. But I first let myself dream about it for two, three years without writing, except notes, like one page here and there, in which I was trying to find the right balance between the different desires, the different approaches I had in mind for this film: On the one hand, the one you're hinting at, this idea of creating a choreography of discovery, to describe this process of somebody falling in love with somebody else, and, at the same time, to describe how cinema, with all its tools and possibilities, can be accurate about it, step by step. In other words, it’s about the pleasure of discovery, but also about the delay, the frustration that comes with it. On the other hand, I also wanted to describe the course of a love story, its past, its future, this epic timeline where everything seems possible. I wanted to make a film about the dialogue of love, its philosophy and its poetry. And I needed time trying to find the right balance, but also because I wanted to push this film in a direction that would be radical and daring enough. It was important to me to find the right structure to integrate the love dialogue and the art dialogue. That was my duty, my own personal assignment. I had this ambition to convey a lot of ideas, without it being all too theoretical. Instead, I wanted this film to be playful and exciting and fun – fun to shoot and fun to watch.

Did you take your inspiration from particular paintings in order to create the aesthetic of the film?

My DP and I, we had an intensive debate around the lighting and the framing of the film, and at one point he said, ‘Okay, we’re going to do it this way, we're not going to build the lighting and the frames like it is a painting, but in the back of our head we know it’s that way.’ So, we didn’t say this whole thing is supposed to look like a Georges de La Tour painting or whatever. On the contrary. We had more references related to cinema, especially about how you light a movie with candles. But we knew that in the end, people would say that the film looked like painted because that’s exactly what cinema is about as well: It’s about lighting, composition, faces and silhouettes. So, we didn't have any particular reference from paintings, except one, but this one was kind of anachronistic, because it's not necessarily related to the time in which the film is set. But we were thinking about [Jean-Baptiste-Camille] Corot who was a French painter from the 19th century, who mostly painted landscapes. He did, however, also paint only a few portraits of women, women in landscapes. And we were excited about how the lightning seems to derive from the characters. They are lighting the painting, and we worked a lot on that, on the colours but also in terms of the wardrobe, to achieve a similar effect.

What were your cinematic references?
BARRY LYNDON is probably the biggest influence, not only to me, but in general in terms of how to light a historic movie. And I don’t mean to say that we wanted to do the same as Kubrick back then. It’s more like that: BARRY LYNDON is a film that has so many ideas in it, that makes you think for yourself. And it’s a film that makes you brave. So instead of copying anything, it’s more about setting a standard that you’re not necessarily going to apply but that you work towards. And in order to do so, we invented our own methods of creating a certain atmosphere and aesthetic of the film. In the same way Kubrick invented his own tools. He even invented a special lense to capture that exact atmosphere he wanted. And we worked in a similar vein. We also built a lot of new tools and thought about how we’re going to manage filming without putting candles in the frame, which was a very strong choice from the beginning.

In both films, yours and BARRY LYNDON, the setting plays an important role as well. It almost feels like another character.
Yes, the place where we shot the film had one strong asset, which was that it hadn't been touched at all over the years. It was an old town hall in the suburbs, in a small commune called La Chapelle-Gauthier about 70km outside of Paris. And when we found it, it wasn’t even very safe. It felt like it was stuck in time. But as soon as we set a foot in the place, we knew, that’s it and that we were not going to touch anything, which is weird, because it seems that if you do a period piece, it's all about recreating the time in which the story is set, to make it as true, make it real. Plus, all my previous film, I’ve always shot in the studio. Apartments from the suburbs, for example, they were always built, none of them where actual flats. And so, this time, I had to deal with a fourth wall. Although it seems like it would have made so much more sense to here not to shoot in a real setting. It’s kind of a paradox for me, and I like that.