“This movie is so close to us,” Adele Exarchopoulos told The New Yorker‘s Emily Greenhouse in a 10.24 post about Blue Is The Warmest Color. “The camera was so close to us, we had to give everything. Director Abdellatif Kechiche, she said, “wanted to capture your soul.”

“’When he’s watching people,’ she said, describing nights at clubs and endless walks with the director, ‘it’s as if he’s on another planet sometimes. Something spiritual.’ On camera, Exarchopoulos does what every French teen-ager does — a mix of cigarettes, sex, and wine, in leather coats and messy hair just so — but she brings a jerking sensitivity and almost animal-like reactivity to the screen. In conversation, she’s like any other person who puts everything out there — which, especially before you’re twenty, is braver than it looks.

At the end of the piece Greenhouse asks Exarchopoulos “if she had worked with other directors since wrapping Blue. She told me she spent six days on another shoot. ‘I was a smaller character, but came in to shoot an important scene, supposed to be complex. And after three takes the director was like, okay, we’re done. I gasped. I was, like, Oh, no, it’s so shitty — I haven’t given anything!'”