Audrey Diwan on reimagining ‘Emmanuelle’ as a film about female pleasure

Audrey Diwan’s third film Emmanuelle opens the San Sebastian International Film Festival tomorrow (September 20).

Noemie Merlant plays a French woman who undergoes a revolution of self discovery on a business trip to Hong Kong. Naomi Watts, Will Sharpe, Jamie Campbell Bower, Chacha Huang and Anthony Wong co-star in the film produced by France’s Chantelouve, Rectangle Productions and Goodfellas. The Veterans is handling sales and Pathe is releasing the film in France on September 25. It shot in French and English in both Hong Kong and France.

Emmanuelle is loosely inspired by the 1967 French-language novel of the same name, written under the pen name Emmanuelle Arsan, about a woman who travels to Bangkok on what is described as an odyssey of sexual self-discovery. The novel was adapted into a series of soft-focus, sexually explicit films directed by Just Jaeckins that began in 1974 and were a sensation in France.

Diwan won Venice’s Golden Lion in 2022 with her second film Happening, based on the novel by Annie Ernaux, about a woman seeking an abortion in 1950s France.

The French writer-director talks to Screen about the challenge of making a film about female pleasure, why she gave her actors control over the intimate scenes and the ongoing fight for gender equality in the film industry. 

Why did you decide to take on a reimagining of Emmanuelle?

My producers [Rectangle’s Edouard Weil and Goodfellas’ Vincent Maraval] gave me the book and I read it, just out of curiosity. I’ve never seen the movie, Emmanuelle. But I have, as everyone in France, the memory of that woman on a chair [in an iconic scene.]

The main element of interest to me is the discussion of ‘what is eroticism?’ Back in 1974, people wanted to see ‘more’. I was like, ‘What about a filmmaking language that would do the opposite? You show less in order to engage people’s imagination and see if you can collaborate with the audience’.

The idea of performance is everywhere. But that’s the end of pleasure to me. Can we seek for something else? That’s when I called the producer and said, ‘I have an idea’. I said, ‘If I am going to do it tell me that I’m fully free. I don’t have to care about the old Emmanuelle’.

I love my producers for being able to cope with that idea.

You’ve said Happening was very hard to finance. Was Emmanuelle any easier?

No! People aren’t ready to hear about a woman’s pleasure. But a woman who doesn’t have pleasure, this is [also] too much.

It wasn’t easy because Emmanuelle comes with a fantasy of the [1974] movie. An expectation. And the expectation goes beyond me. It’s what people want to see. I had to fight that expectation. Instead, let’s talk about female pleasure.

How did you pitch it to your cast? What questions did they have for you?

It was probably the most collaborative work I’ve ever experienced as I knew I was asking a lot. We were all going to talk about the very fragile topic of intimacy. I didn’t arrive with answers. I told them my questions. Where does pleasure come from?

There was one rule. I didn’t want to make an erotic movie like people would make a sports movie. It’s not like every 20 minutes you are going to see something that relates to eroticism. I guess the movie made the right people come to it. We built it together.

How did you prepare with your cast for the sex scenes? Did you have an intimacy coordinator?

Yes definitely. What I realised is when you give back the power to actors, they are freer than they used to be. Everything you hear about MeToo not allowing people to do anything anymore is a complete mistake. In my experience with the actors, it was the absolute opposite. We were trying to depict something together and we know the meaning because what matters is that the actors are acting. They needed to try to make something happen related to the sense, to the feeling, to the dramaturgy of the whole movie.

If you just ask them to portray having sex and it’s not related to the rest of the movie, then you are asking them to use their own experience and   you are stealing that experience from them in order for you to watch them with pleasure. A twisted pleasure.

How did that work in practice?

[There is a scene in which] Noemie [’s character] is masturbating to find her own pleasure again. It’s [Noemie’s] body in front of the camera. But she’s working on the sensations of the character, trying to define what is pleasure, something very hard to define on screen as it’s something very internal. 

We worked a lot with the DoP [Laurent Tany, with whom Diwan also worked on Happening] and with the intimacy coordinator. Noemie should only care about the emotions and the sensations of the character and the camera should circle her and try to catch what she is doing.

Each shot of that sequence was 12 minutes long because she needed the time to find the right level, the accurate moment that shows ‘ok, this is female pleasure’. 

Noemie was in control. And because she was in control, because we talked about it, because we know our filming system, she’s free to go there. She doesn’t have to fight against the camera, we are not stealing anything from her, she’s searching, exploring, and we are going with her along that way.

How did you work with Rebecca Zlotowski, with whom you co-wrote the script?

We were in the same room. We’re friends. I really wanted to have her around me as I know how she talks about bodies and sexuality. She doesn’t fear [it]. I’m more of a prude. I was, like, ‘open the doors for me’.

Did you end up making the film you wanted?

It took me time to say I’m happy. It’s a strange movie and I love its strangeness. It’s not easy to write an inner journey that you will show and share. [I had to] find my own equilibrium, and my own language. It took me time and I did it and I’m so grateful to my editor [Pauline Gaillard].

Imagine you need to depict pleasure and you see the same sequence every day [in the edit suite]. At some point you are like, ‘I don’t feel anything’, So you need to refresh and then go back. That was very challenging.

What surprised you about filming in English?

Not the relationship to the actors, that I really enjoyed. I think [it was] about the music of the dialogue, I’d like to work more on that. It’s something you obviously cannot feel as in your own language. I’ve been struggling with that idea. Since then, I’ve been taking English classes. 

Your next film, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, will also be in English.

Yes. I’m at the beginning of the work but pretty inspired. I have obsessions and sometimes I’m like, should I fight those obsessions? And then, ‘no, embrace it’.

As a member of gender equality group Collectif 50/50 do you believe the French film industry is beginning to making real progress?

The fact we openly talk about the problems seems to be the first nice step. But when you accept that problems exist, it doesn’t give you the answers right away. You need to be very careful because we need to build something strong, a way to work together. We need to reverse all the insane ideas.

Some people have tried to say ‘MeToo is the end of freedom’ and it’s so completely wrong. You have to tell people, ‘It’s a new world where progress means freedom. Don’t be scared, It’s going to be better’. 

What are you looking forward to seeing at San Sebastian?

It’s an amazing year for filmmakers and I don’t want to leave anyone [out] but I want to see the Mike Leigh, Gia Coppola, Edward Berger, Costa Gavras, filmmakers that I love. I’m so happy to be part of such a great selection. The other thing I like beside making movies is watching movies. If I could, I’d stay for the whole of San Sebastian. 

• San Sebastian adds Edward Berger, Mike Leigh titles to competition line-up