Director
Catherine Breillat remembered how, during the shooting,
Gilles Guillain, the actor who plays Thomas, revealed her he was still a virgin. "One day we were at the table, with the whole crew, and I asked him if he had ever been in love. He looked me directly in the eye and said in a barely audible, but still clear voice, 'Yes, I've been in love before, but I've never really gotten into it.' We all looked at each other a little strangely, because, I mean, in the film he was playing a sixteen-year-old boy, but in reality he's eighteen, although this excessive shyness helps make him appear younger." So Breillat had to rewrite, in part, the love scene between him and
Sarah Pratt, creating a choreography that corresponded better to their bodies. Morever, she told her head cameraman that all the scene had to be filmed once, there was to be no repetition, "because what would happen the first time would be something really upsetting. And it's true, their love scene is magnificent, because all of a sudden you see that he's doing it, he's living it, but it's so fragile and so strong at the same time that if there had been a second take he would have already been used to the scene."
