I consider myself to be a painter

That’s what the head of censorship said when he read the screenplay. He didn’t raise an eyebrow at the sexual stuff, it was the way in which I described, at the beginning of the film, the woman on the train; I had a take on society that was disagreeable, contemptuous, I was presenting a terrible image of France. But that wasn’t the subject. My subject was a little girl in the provinces who hated everything and everyone, except the boy she liked, whom she ultimately hated, too. The film may have been wild, but Hiram Keller, whom I had seen in Fellini’s Satyricon, was a star at the time. The grocer is played by Shirley Stoler from The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle, 1970). Mort Shuman composed and performed all the music. I don’t think that stars of that stature would have dared or have had the generosity to make that sort of a film today.

It’s like eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)! An aesthetics of slime that disgusts us and is intimately tied to the feminine. That’s what Cronenberg understood. I’m certain that he wanted to do that, reestablish slime as an aesthetic and moral value. My novel Le soupirail (The Basement Window) was tightly written, full of metaphorical images. Actually, I have to keep myself from writing alexandrines when I’m writing modern things—for me, the legitimacy of the French language can be found in the alexandrine. So the book is overrun with musical language; it’s when I had to make images out of it that it grew very com- plicated. For example, the little spoon that she sticks in her vagina … How do you film that? How do you ensure that the poetry of the book doesn’t become, once it’s filmed, prosaic? An image has to have a certain violence.

With A Real Young Girl, I decided that I wouldn’t use French colors, which were fashionable at the time. All of French cinema was predominantly beige or blue. I decided that the film would be multicolored, garish, that we would have a trailer covered in orange carpet that was in at the time, the ugliest thing in the world. I hadn’t ever been inside a trailer but I had wanted to confront that horrible universe people lived in. I sewed Alice’s T-shirt myself, it was turquoise, a color that was considered to be awful, and I added this absurd braided white rickrack to the collar. I dyed the bathing suit pink and black. I hate good taste—that belongs in a bourgeois salon, not in art. The only concern that the French censor had with A Real Young Girl was about my very negative opinion of the French population.

France is sycophantic and hypocritical and, what’s even worse, the slogan of the French Revolution is “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity for all men,” meaning no woman will ever be their equal. It’s France’s founding principle, the only country where royalty applied the Salic law: women can’t reign. Queens everywhere, except in France. They’d rather go and find some distant, hated cousin than have a woman rule. The hatred for women in France runs deep, so deep that they guillotined a revolutionary like Olympe de Gouges. Misogyny is in France’s DNA.

I never make films about the orgasm or about pleasure, I don’t care about that. That’s not what counts. There’s something more important. I’m searching for ecstasy, the transparent body, that state of nearly immobile ecstasy where you escape all material contingency. Penetration, sex, doesn’t interest me except as a means to realize the transparent body. Of course, it has to move through that, but what interests me is the passage from the trivial to the divine, that sensation of eternity. That happens very rarely and when it doesn’t happen, we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of the orgasm and pleasure. I couldn’t agree more.

That isn’t my cinema at all. My cinema is about ritual. Idealism is ritual, we’re dealing with symbols of purity, divinity. Caroline is Joan of Arc, a saint on a crusade. Sexuality is simply the path to amorous abstraction. The path is sexual, that’s the way it is. But because we’ve turned it into a commercial, obscene object, we tend to forget that. I don’t know what eroticism is. Romance was made in a state of trance, we were aiming very, very high.

I don’t think I’m ever bored. Let’s just say that boredom is my way of thinking. That gives me an enormous amount of power, it’s a way of being with yourself. They say that cinema is a collective art, but it isn’t at all: the auteur is alone, absolutely alone. Now, less so, but at the time, a shoot seemed as long to me as when you tell a child that you’re leaving for two days—two days is forever. 36 fillette, despite being short, only six or seven weeks of shooting, seemed interminable to me. I couldn’t see the end of it and I was absolutely alone. For everyone else it was Club Med; I hated them because they were fooling around. You make a film alone, you don’t have fun. Your actor has to be available: if he’s having fun, he’ll spoil.

Christian Bourgois warned me. He said, “It’s crazy, everyone who hangs out with writers must know that they will, to some extent, show up in their work. They blame you not only because they recognize themselves, but because on top of that, it isn’t really them.” Obviously: you steal something from them and at the same time, it isn’t them, that’s the problem when you draw from your own life. Bergman, Proust, Miller: they did the same thing. You have no choice. My films are profoundly autobiographical and yet not that autobiographical: I amalgamate eras, one person with another, then I’ll add a news story. I don’t invent anything, just the order. I rearrange, but I don’t invent anything.

You mustn’t understand that sexually, but as it was understood in eighteenth-century France: actors were considered prostitutes because they felt real emotions, which they ranted about in public, and because their bodies were the tools they used to do their work. That’s not a moral judgement, it’s a fact. They’re not simulating anything, so it’s prostitution. But it’s a sacred kind of prostitution, prostitution for art. There will always be bad faith assholes who say, “Breillat said actors are prostitutes” But who wouldn’t want to be prostituted for art?

Since every filmmaker just gives up, since they delegate what’s most beautiful about ourselves—namely, sexuality—to pornographic cinema, I have to take care of it. The imperative is to say: “No, that’s not the way you make love.” It’s showing that the filmmaker’s gaze transcends all of that, that it isn’t about pornography, that something else entirely is going on.

Yes, that fascinates me. When there used to be absolute sexual freedom, after the pill and abortion, before AIDS. In that era, you could go with any guy you wanted, and it could end badly, you could be murdered. I always kept myself from doing that, I was afraid, but I think that I would have followed any Jack the Ripper. That could be fascinating.

It is the subject for me. No one has ever talked about or filmed what’s really interesting in that fairy tale, that’s why it’s my subject. What needs to be said is that in reality, the Beast is the prince: we see him as a beast, but he is Prince Charming. The Beast is the dark object of desire in some way. It’s the sexual attraction that you don’t want to admit, so it takes the form of a beast to which the Beauty is very attracted. I’m the only one who can say that, the others are kitsch, except for Cocteau, who is obviously sublime.

Saying that you're making a film is already a refusal of the real. You don’t have a penny to make it with, but you have to tell yourself you’re going to make it so that you can raise the money—just barely, but you end up raising it. You have to refuse the real in order to make films that aren’t made for the market. If you want to make a product for the market and use “bankable” actors that are pushed on you by the big agencies, and television producers give you money… then you’re not in denial of the real.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I adore Raphael. Actually, I love them all: Titian, Botticelli. I borrowed their soul, since the soul is what counts. I have this thing about the eyelid that comes from quattrocento. That kind of transparency, it’s like Mona Lisa’s smile, but with the eyelid. There is very little flesh in those paintings, but what flesh there is is incandescent. It’s sublime because it’s sublimated. It’s a very particular type of light that materializes like a screen, and the face has to spread out over the screen, which creates a kind of vertigo. Painters position the irises of the eyes in a certain way, and that’s not something the actors can know. I’m the one who has to say, “No, cast your eye downward.” That detail changes the entire meaning of the scene. Painting, after all, has a kind of écriture that’s embedded in our minds. Basically, I consider myself to be a painter.