French director Audrey Diwan is opening the San Sebastian Film Festival this evening with third feature Emmanuelle, in the company of its star Noémie Merlant and supporting cast members Will Sharpe, Chacha Huang and Jamie Campbell Bower.

Diwan, who won Venice’s Golden Lion for abortion drama Happening in 2021, has taken inspiration for her first English-language picture from Emmanuelle Arsan’s erotic novel, originally published clandestinely in France in 1959 and then officially in 1967.

The work sparked a franchise of erotic, soft porn films, kicking off with Just Jaeckin’s 1974 cult movie, starring Sylvia Kristel as a woman who joins her diplomat husband in Bangkok where she embarks on a series of sexual adventures.

In Diwan’s contemporary adaptation, Merlant plays hotel quality control agent Emmanuelle, who is sent to audit a luxury hotel in Hong Kong, where she comes up against a steely hotel manager, played by Naomi Watts.

Bored and stifled by her outwardly luxurious existence as she hangs out in the hotel’s high-end facilities, Emmanuelle attempts to shake herself out of her emotional torpor with a series of fleeting sexual encounters with staff members and guests.

They leave her cold but there is one guest, who whets her curiosity and sets her imagination on fire, but he seems out of reach.

Deadline talked to Diwan ahead of tonight’s world premiere.

DEADLINE: What inspired you to revisit Emmanuelle. The original film inspired by the novel feels outdated today and is also pretty violent in terms of its treatment of the heroine?

AUDREY DIWAN: I’ve never seen the film.

DEADLINE: Even in preparation for this film?

DIWAN: Years ago, I started watching the first film, but pretty quickly, I had the certitude that it wasn’t addressed at me and turned it off.

But there is the book, which is situated in another place. Yes, there is a form of violence, because there was a way of thinking at time that was violent, linked to colonialism, or post-colonialism, and the idea that ‘the other’ could become an object. It’s a way of thinking which is terrifying.

But there are also questions which I perceive as being treated differently. She is the subject of the story, not the object. There’s something interesting in the idea that at that time, we’re talking 1959, a woman wrote a book about this journey, this quest of a young woman to identify pleasure and optimize it.

DEADLINE: What was it specifically in the book that inspired you to bring it to the big screen?

DIWAN: About a third of the book is a very long conversation about eroticism. Everything started there. I originally read the book recreationally. I wasn’t thinking about adapting it. It intrigued me, made me smile, but then I started reflecting about the question of what is eroticism in our society. In the 1970s, eroticism was situated between what was shown and what was hidden. It works because people always want to see more. I said to myself, that today we could do the reverse, using the same framework, to hide and ask the spectators to work their imagination.

I’ve always loved collaborative stories and the idea of asking spectators to connect with the film and work with it. It’s a formal idea but I liked it, but it wasn’t a reason to make a film, it was a few months later that I started thinking about this woman without a sense of pleasure and what that means in today’s world and I started to make her evolve.

DEADLINE: It’s a complex exercise. Eroticism has been dominated by certain codes of seduction and domination in literature, cinema for centuries, decades. How did you set about exploring this today?

DIWAN: I wanted to involve my inner self in the film. It was a question of how I would define this relationship to the body, to pleasure and her quest, and whether I would be able to transcribe my emotions, my ideas and sensations into an image. We’re talking about depicting something that cannot be seen. Everything is done inside. The complexity of this desire and the path it takes are things that cannot be seen. I wanted us to be in this hotel, a bit like in a mental space. That is to say that we are in her head, and that we cross these corridors as if we were entering the psyche of the character.

DEADLINE: Sexuality. eroticism, sexual fantasies can be something very private. How easy was it for you to explore this openly in this way for the film?

DIWAN: Yes, in fact, it was difficult but after Happening, I promised myself one thing, which was that I no longer wanted to be comfortable. I told myself I would remake a film the day when fear and pleasure meet. For me, it’s a good balance for getting down to creating. It’s also the principle behind the work of Annie Ernaux [the author of the novel on which Happening is based]. There is always this point where to explore an unknown territory, you have to overcome a fear of talking about it. I had people around me saying, “Are you really going to make this?” I am actually very modest. I found the process beautiful, even it was terrifying.

DEADLINE: Did having director and screenwriter Rebecca Zlotowski as a co-writer help?

DIWAN: She was mainly there at the beginning of the work. She helped me set the foundations stones and the pilers of the project. We’ve known each other for a long time and are friends, which is one reason I asked her to come to work with me. She also has great freedom and takes pleasure in talking about the body. I understood that from her film An Easy Girl [about a hedonistic teenage girl]. I felt she would help me open these doors. She supported me in this quest and maybe even lent me some words. It was really important to have started this adventure with her.

DEADLINE: Noémie Merlant’s performance as Emmanuelle is a tour de force. She is an actress who works with her body on the big screen with great ease…

DIWAN: She was the right actress because we understood the character in the same way and since she’s in every shot and is central to the film, it was essential we were on the same page. She is also undisputedly the right actress for this film because, as her entire filmography attests, she is someone who has really interrogated herself about the body of the actress and its image. In fact, she is so sure of what she thinks that she is free… she’s a woman, an actress, a director, who in showing her body, does it powerfully and consciously. This power and consciousness allow her to determine where she wants to take it. Noémie is someone who goes really far in her work. Her way of exploring and searching is really great for a director, but also because she does it in the full knowledge of what she is trying to achieve.  

DEADLINE: How did you set up the erotic scenes?

DIWAN.  Eroticism interested me as a subject but not in the moments where there are naked bodies. That doesn’t interest me at all. What interests me is the atmosphere, the way in which people look at one another. How they try to control themselves and then, gradually, looks can become tinged with desires and interests. I think a storm can be erotic, words can be erotic. When we talk about desire, it must be registered elsewhere than in the logic of bodies, because that would really be very limited.

Noémie and I shared that idea and we worked on it throughout the film. At the beginning of the film, the scenes are cut in a somewhat rigid way since we are talking about this world which is rigid but the further we advance in the film, the less the shots are planned. We of course set them up but there were moments where cinematographer Laurent Tangy and Noémie started improvising together and it was my role as the director not to interrupt them. The scene, for example, where she is enjoying the sensation of her own body, where she is masturbating, we did the scene three times. We ended up with three times twelve minutes. Noémie was searching and Laurent was following her, and I told myself that how it’s going to be.

DEADLINE: Do you think the fact that Noémie is also a director in her own right helped?

DIWAN: Definitely. Will Sharpe is also a director. I was surrounded by actors who helped me push the frame.  We had a lot of discussions about the project and how we were going to bring it to life on screen. It really helped me that these two actors were also directors.

DEADLINE: In terms of the backdrop, why did you decide to set it in a luxury hotel in Hong Kong?

DIWAN: Firstly, for the décor and the mise en scene but also because my sense that desire is being wiped out by things being prepared in advance and pleasure is thought of as something artificial. These days, every time you go to a place, or set off adventures, we check in advance what will happen, looking at the notes or commentaries of others.

The scenario of pleasure, and this goes beyond the sexual question, has become something very manufactured, very artificial, and after a while, this kills desire. The setting was the symptom of this problem. I also liked the idea of looking at the other side of this world, and the effort and work of others that goes on behind the scenes manufacturing the pleasure of a few.

DEADLINE: Does this artificiality of these environments chime with your own experiences, perhaps as you toured internationally with Happening after its Venice win?

DIWAN: I guess it was partly then that I connected with this reality but something, that I’ve never really talked about before, is that you climb this huge mountain to success, you arrive and then find yourself in these places of huge solitude. Emmanuelle does not come from this background. She’s always been told it is the Holy Grail to get there. She realizes she was wrong and that her life’s quest is not at all to be in this place, but she is afraid of leaving, even though she gets no pleasure from it, and then one day she takes that step.