First off, go see Blue Is the Warmest Color when it is released on Friday. It’s an incredible film, maybe the best of the year, and although it spans three hours, it’s an emotional and heartbreaking epic.
Star Léa Seydoux (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) is involved in a series of incredibly intimate lesbian sex scenes and in an interview with Metro, she revealed that she found filming them “extremely difficult”. Expanding, she said that filming the sex scenes were “humiliating and gross” to shoot: “You have to be out of your body. It’s too difficult… I wanted to go far in a character. I wanted to, like, explore and expose myself. And even the sex scenes… I wanted to experience how it would be to shoot things like that… I had to be the character and give everything, but, at the same time, I had to protect myself. It was like an existentialist experience.”
An adaptation of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, Blue Is the Warmest Color deservedly won the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival and has been met with near universal critical acclaim; I can’t recommend it enough.
Originally published November 19, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.