[on
É Tempo de Amar (2023)] There is a biographical starting point. I found out late that my own grandmother had an affair with a German soldier during the Occupation, became pregnant and was left as a single mother. She met my grandfather four years later on a beach in Brittany, as in the film. He was from a higher social background and went against his family's wishes by marrying her and adopting the infant. They spent their whole life pretending the child was their biological child. So that story had been with me for a long time and was a really strong inspiration, but beyond that starting point, everything else in the film is totally fictionalized, away from my family history. We invented and wrote this story with
Gilles Taurand and it turns out that melodrama is a genre we both love. I have a passion for the films of
Douglas Sirk,
James L. Brooks and
Todd Haynes. I have a love for the romantic story, a genre that is not very well exploited in French cinema and that I had begun to explore with
Suzanne (2013). Melodrama touches me because it is a genre that has a very strong relationship with emotion. That is what I am looking for above all in cinema.
