BAZ BAMIGBOYE: I bared my soul in graphic nude sex scenes, says the star of new hit movie

By Baz Bamigboye for the Daily Mail

Updated: 08:59 EDT, 27 September 2013

Powerful performance: Adele Exarchopoulos excels in the love story that was shown to critical acclaim

Adele Exarchopoulos said she and her co-star in the year’s most controversial movie, Blue Is The Warmest Colour, performed explicit sex scenes over and over again because the director wanted ‘everything to be authentic and dangerous’.

And because he wouldn’t stop filming.

‘He didn’t want artifice,’ Adele told me of film-maker Abdellatif Kechiche. ‘He was searching for something, looking for something dangerous every day, on a film where we spent five months working seven days a week.’

In the picture — one of the best ever about first love — we meet Adele playing a 15-year-old student (also called Adele).

She knocks around with a lad at college but feels she’s missing something — until she bumps into Emma, an artist (played by Lea Seydoux) whose hair is ‘bleu’.

Later, Adele finds herself fantasising about Emma. After meeting again in a bar, they begin to fall in love.

‘It’s a very deep love story,’ the actress said. ‘It’s painful to be dealing with a passion that can destroy you. That’s what she felt, and because of the way we filmed it, I felt that too.’

The sheer honesty of the performances were such that the Cannes Film Festival jury awarded the Palme d’Or not just to the director, as protocol dictates, but to Exarchopoulos and Seydoux as well.

There’s a chance Adele could be nominated for a best actress Bafta — and possibly an Oscar (she’s been snapped up by Hollywood agent Hylda Queally, who represents Kate Winslet and Cate Blanchett).

There were mammoth queues at the film festivals in Telluride and Toronto, where it was shown to more critical acclaim. And it’s being screened here, at the BFI London Film Festival on October 14 and 17, before going on general release on November 15.

Adele said that Kechiche’s style was to work to a point where ‘everyone is exhausted’. She explained, as we sat in the Paris sunshine: ‘Abdul stands there and lets you do a scene with food, where my screen father serves me seven or eight portions of spaghetti bolognese, one after the other — although the worst was eating toxic kebabs at eight in the morning.

The honesty of the performances were such that the Cannes Film Festival jury awarded the Palme d¿Or not just to the director, but to Exarchopoulos and Seydoux too

‘Or, you’d be naked on a bed with Lea for hours while he and the cameramen just watched and filmed you. He’d keep you doing it, waiting for the stage of exhaustion. We had no hair or make-up artists. So not only were we exhausted, but we would look exhausted.

‘He really wants to see what’s in your soul — and maybe it’s easy to see your soul if you’re naked,’ she said, as Kechiche sat within earshot. She noticed my glance and laughed: ‘Don’t worry, he doesn’t understand English.’

The film runs for three hours, and every aspect of the romance and friendship between Adele and Emma, that stretches over seven years, is explored.

The love-making scenes are long, too — one runs for 11-12 minutes — but it’s  powerful stuff, not gratuitous (although some women have objected to the  graphic nature).

Adele said before filming started, Kechiche asked if she was comfortable with nudity.

‘I said yes, though it depends. He told me he was going to treat the sex scenes with good lighting, and they would be tasteful, and they’d run two minutes,’ she said.

‘He said I’d be in bed with this girl. Sex is part of life, so I agreed.

‘It was very different from what he said,’ she added. ‘He was working with two cameraman and I asked if they would take their clothes off, too; but they didn’t want to. And after a while, it didn’t matter.

‘At the beginning, Lea and I were prudish and we’d wear robes between scenes. But eventually, we didn’t care.

‘Lea and I became very close because she knew more about my body than my boyfriend,’ she said. ‘We became allies.

‘I don’t think the sex is anything to be ashamed of. There’s a lot of it, because he just kept filming and filming, but I’m more scared when I see people killing each other than I am of them having sex.

‘Also, I’d rather do one hour of sex than have to eat all that food again!’

When I asked if she would work with Kechiche again, she thought for a moment. ‘I honestly don’t know. I would probably regret it if I didn’t. But it was hard for a 19-year-old to work on this movie with such intensity.

‘I know I have worked with a genius. But every genius is a torturer. He doesn’t like it when I say that, but it’s the best compliment. Look at Francis Coppola when he made Apocalypse Now.’

Take a Deco at superb Commitments

Wild scenes at the Palace Theatre for the first preview of The Commitments, based on Roddy Doyle’s best-selling novel set in Dublin.

Killian Donnelly, left, plays stroppy lead singer Deco in the white soul group (‘Say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud!’ the white dudes cry) being assembled by wide boy Jimmy Rabbitte (a winning Denis Grindel).

Donnelly has a voice that commands your attention. Knock On Wood was the first giant number in the show and he and the superb ensemble knocked it out of the park.

It's one of the most exhilarating nights out in London ¿ and hats off to the producers for halving ticket prices during previews

Someone dismissed it as a jukebox show but I believe there’s more to it than that.

Director Jamie Lloyd and his team are refining things; they’ve already made changes to both the acts.

But it’s one of the most exhilarating nights out in London — and hats off to the producers for halving ticket prices during previews.

There are 19 main songs, and 19 featured numbers, and I loved the way Donnelly — with Sarah O’Connor, Stephanie McKeon and Jessica Cervi — handle There’s A Thin Line Between Love And Hate, an underlying message of the show.

Watch out for

• Peter Morgan, who is writing a film for director Ang Lee about the historic bouts between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. ‘It’s a look at how brutal the confrontations were between Ali and Frazier,’ Morgan told me. ‘They were marked by how aggressive Ali was towards Frazier out of the ring. He taunted and belittled him.’ Morgan will watch their three legendary fights in the Seventies — including the landmark Thrilla in Manila — and look at other heavyweight matches around that era. ‘Ang wants to work with 3-D technology that will make an audience feel as if they’re inside the ring,’ Morgan explained, adding that Lee wants to use actual footage of the fights and incorporate whoever is cast to play the boxers into it. The award-winning screenwriter said he won’t complete the screenplay till well into next year. Meanwhile his latest film Rush, about the titanic rivalry between Formula 1 drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda, is a break-out hit and is expected to feature in the forthcoming awards season.
• 

  Shailene Woodley stars in a rare gem

  Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller, who star in a rare gem of a movie called The Spectacular Now, a hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. When I heard that director James Ponsoldt’s film was a teenage, high school love story I wanted to run away, but it’s the antithesis of the usual teen fare chucked out by studios.Woodley, who was George Clooney’s elder daughter in The Descendants, plays Aimee, the kind of nice, almost retiring student who never gets noticed in life and who becomes involved with Sutter (Miles Teller), a wise guy with a booze problem who literally lands on her front lawn. Ponsoldt deftly shows he’s really a fragile, lost boy who needs someone like Aimee to rescue him. Do catch the movie at the BFI London Film Festival, where it’s being shown on October 10, 11 and 20.
• Juliet Stevenson, who will play Samuel Beckett’s seemingly indomitable Winnie in a new production of his classic 1961 piece Happy Days, which Natalie Abrahami will direct at the Young Vic from January 23. Winnie finds herself embedded deeper and deeper in a mound of earth. I’ve always thought of her being covered with sand on a  British beach. She chatters away incessantly to the (mostly) unseen Willie, who’s burrowed away beneath her. One critic described the play as a ‘comedy of existential bleakness’. I went on a school outing to see Peggy Ashcroft play Winnie at the National, but I was far too young to fathom what it all meant.