- Caroline Ducey, Romance, France, 1998.
“I had to take an unknown girl – or hardly known – as agencies wouldn’t send me actresses,” said director Catherine Breillat about her latest controversial sex film. “I must have auditioned about 200 aspiring actresses. [Including Ducey’s friend, Florence, a true actress said Breillat–(in 76 films). Florence, however, told Ducey she felt the auteur was much too over the top for her. Breillat finished with a shortlist of the most gorgeous 15 girls. Caroline, who tested last on a Friday the 13th (she missed the omens), “wasn’t exactly beautiful… but she was mine. She had what I like between the eyebrow and the eyelid, her cheek was full of emotion, something often missing in gorgeous girls. She looked like a Chinese ink drawing.” Ducey was excited. “I felt we’d hit it off.” She was to be gravely disapointed. The script was ”very disturbing, terribly sad, awfully dark: not what I‘d been expecting after this encounter with Catherine. It was about a man who wouldn’t touch his wife as she shouldn’t be soiled by sex. But I think that sex is the most beautiful thing in the world and while trying to understand what Catherine wanted to express, I also tried to inject all the lightness I could.” Breillat felt Caroline understood what the auteur wanted to do. “At least she understood it her way, and she said yes. You’re always afraid that actors may refuse to do… something even if it was written loud and clear in the script.” No question of Ducey reneging on any sex scenes. “I had no obection to doing it for real. But when I tried to discuss those scenes, Catherine answered: ‘That’s none of my business.’ So I assumed it was my business. Didn’t turn out that way on the set. It was her business. I felt we had a mission in common. I came along unarmed, ready… to go for the real thing…. I thought I’d found a spiritual mother. She hurt me because she didn’t trust me, while she had the evidence that she could.” The problem, she summed up, was simple. “Catherine’s generation and mine didn’t have the same teenage years.”[Director and actress were talking to my good friend Frederic Albert Levy in Paris for the 2018 Severin Films blue-ray bonus].
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