No./3 A festival icon finds a new groove

How director Jacques Audiard changed his filmmaking style for an authentic portrait of modern Parisian love

FRENCH DIRECTOR JACQUES Audiard, who won the 2015 Palme d’or for crime drama Dheepan, was back in the Cannes competition this year with a tender and sexy story of romance between four Parisians. Work on Les Olympiades, Paris 13e — the film’s original title — began with Audiard and Céline Sciamma adapting American graphic novel Killing And Dying, by Adrian Tomine, into a screenplay. “We made it a French story by localising it into the 13th district of Paris,” Audiard tells Empire. “And why the 13th? Because I lived there for a long time and it’s a very exotic neighbourhood. It’s in Paris, but you feel very far away from Paris.”

Léa Mysius took over as Audiard’s screenwriting partner after a hiatus (in which Audiard made eccentric Western The Sisters Brothers) rendered Sciamma unavailable. The final script contains ideas from all three, and was filmed in black and white, because Audiard “wanted Paris not to look like Paris”.

There are a lot of sex scenes, notable for conveying specific passions that add to the characters. How do these scenes seem so natural when directed by a 69-year-old renowned for gritty crime dramas? There was a choreographer on set and, Audiard explains, Makita Samba and Noémie Merlant designed their sex scenes together independently. “They showed me something and I said, ‘No’, ‘Yes’, ‘More of this’. Noémie came up with more ideas than I actually had.” When pressed to reveal which ideas, Audiard laughs, “It’s a bit strange to talk about this at midday, but the scene when she proposes sodomy, when she slaps her own bottom.”

This openness was reflective of the overall process. “We rehearsed a lot and new things happened during this process that were on the verge of improvisation and were re-integrated into the script.” Some changes happened during the shoot itself. In one gorgeous scene, Émilie (Lucie Zhang) returns to her restaurant workplace after a hook-up, and she is dancing. This came about during the shoot. “I was bored and I said, ‘Dance!’”

Ever the unpredictable filmmaker, Audiard next wants to make a musical set in Mexico. Radical changes in form, it seems, come naturally to him. “I go towards where I find it interesting.”