Interview with Celine Sciamma
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Celine Sciamma
French writer and director known for Tomboy, Girlhood, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Petite Maman. Portrait of a Lady on Fire won Best Screenplay at Cannes.
Source: BAFTA Guru on YouTube
These answers are taken from Céline Sciamma | BAFTA Screenwriters’ Lecture Series on BAFTA Guru's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What drew you to a career as a filmmaker?
I think a lot of things about screenwriting. In fact, I believe I am a screenwriter because I like asking myself questions about screenwriting. I do this job to have the opportunity to reflect and be part of the invention, the defense, the politics of writing for cinema.
I believe that my movies should be prototypes, and invent their own language. Still, even within an experimental dynamic, you still have to find a way of doing it, a method or process for searching and finding the ideas. To me, writing is about having desires for ideas. Therefore, it is always about trying to build an architecture of multiple desires. Screenwriting is the opportunity to work on your desires rather than acting immediately on them.
What do you enjoy most about making films?
As a screenwriter, when somebody pitches you something or when you think freely about a plot, ideas come in very fast. You really find some narrative arcs, some obstacle, this scene, where? This character, who? In hours, minutes sometimes. I'm sure screenwriters know that feeling very well. There is no blank page syndrome at the beginning of writing, because it's our job. It's craft, with tools for building stories, and it's a thrilling sensation.
When you begin to write, it's super hot, and then you think about it and it becomes super cold, and then you have to find hot solutions to cold ideas. It's about this back and forth. Speaking with the heart doesn't mean it's obvious. You have to work with what you feel.
What was a great moment for you as a filmmaker?
For Portrait, it appeared quite clearly the desire was to break the narrative of conflict, and once you make that diagnosis you should go for it all the way. And going all the way with this script was writing a love story based on equality. It is two women meeting, so there is no gender domination. And then I decided that there will also be no intellectual domination, even though it's an artist and a model, and also never to play with social hierarchy. Those decisions are hard to take, because we are born and raised in cinema being taught that conflict is the natural dynamic of storytelling.
So, no conflict. Boring? I got the Best Screenplay Award in Cannes. So maybe, but also I guess not. Lack of conflict doesn't mean lack of tension. Lack of conflict doesn't mean a lack of eroticism. Lack of conflict actually means a new rhythm, because the dialogues are not built on bargaining, and a new power dynamic that allows surprises and new suspense.
What advice do you have for new filmmakers?
Screenwriters know how to write, and sometimes this might be our biggest problem, because this knowledge comes from our culture of storytelling. I think writing is all about questioning that. Putting desire at the center isn't about making it organic or personal. It is to make it sharp and uncompromising. It is about being radical with yourself, not self-indulgent at all. It's about resisting easy pleasures and resisting the temptation of belonging.
At the stage of my fourth film, I decided to get rid of the scenes which had been sticking for too long in the needed list. I just erased them. It actually helps you be brave and depart from the comfort of a solution that has been tested, that works, and that feels reassuring. When you go along with the convention and the rules of storytelling, it looks like you're writing, because it's efficient and understood. It takes a strong will to go deep. You have to accept the fact that you're choosing unsatisfaction for a while.
That's why you must take writing so seriously. If you are radical with your desires in the scene, nothing will take it away, and you will always be ready for the rising tide.
How do you keep your cast and crew communicating well on set?
Everything you write will have 20 people working on it, so that means hundreds of questions you are going to have to answer. Some of them will seem pointless, but you can't leave one single question unanswered. Your absence of choice will have an impact. The three women are in the kitchen. Writing the scene is five lines. Making the scene is answering: what time of the day is it? What's the weather like? What's the menu? What shade and shape of plates do you want? Give the actress lessons of embroidery. Design the embroidery weeks before with an artist. It is about caring. You have to care about every detail.
Kissing scenes are generally carefully scripted as "they kiss" or "they passionately kiss," and then it's on the actors' shoulders. It shouldn't be. Actors should always be part of the deliberation of an idea, especially with intimate scenes. So I wanted to craft a scene that would embody the sexiness of consent.
Describe your filmmaking style.
The scenes are the center of my writing process: each scene as a unit of desire. Technically, it is about having two files open on my laptop, two lists. The first list is very free. It's a list of ideas for scenes, sometimes just images, a line of dialogue. For Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my first list was: having Adele Haenel run fast toward the edge of a cliff, actually setting fire to the character, a group of women singing an unknown tune in the night. Those are the desired scenes. They are your compass. The other file is a list of scenes you need, the steps that are inevitably building the story. My work is all about making them belong to the other list. Not a single scene must stay on the needed list, because it's cinema.
I don't work at all thinking about character design. I never think about characters as fictional persons. I don't think about backstories for them. I don't even give them surnames. I just know how they act and what they go through in the present of the narrative. The characters are desire-driven, and I'm pretty sure it is linked to the fact that I'm writing female-driven stories.
Tell me about a production that was hard to pull off. What was it and why was it challenging?
When you put so much desire into a scene, you also have a strong anticipation of the moment of shooting it, especially intimate scenes. You want it to go smoothly, to share with your cast, care for your cast. That day came. First, we did the very long traveling [shot] by the sea with their hands touching, and then Heloise disappears, and you find her in the grotto. We had trouble finding the right way to do it. We lost an hour.
So when we began shooting the kissing scene, I only had 15 minutes ahead of me, because the water was rising and strong waves were already coming at our feet. So the shooting of this intimate scene became five takes in a row, with me basically shouting at the actors from the distance, being totally frustrated, with strong waves coming closer. The process of shooting a film is about compromising, so knowing your priorities.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your filmography.
There's a scene in the film where they read the Orpheus and Eurydice myth and talk about the meaning of the story. And this is something that came very last in the process of writing the script. We had already begun financing with it, but I felt something was missing. I needed a "Netflix and chill" scene between the women. I had them playing cards, ended up drinking, and I was like, I want fiction in their life, because the film is about that. Art is an education to love, love is an education to art.
Orpheus and Eurydice is perfect for that. It's one of the myths that feminist lecturers have been playing with a lot, because it's actually about the male gaze. It's about a man looking at a woman and basically killing her because he's looking at her at the wrong moment. Frankly, it took two minutes. I was like, oh my god, this is gonna be a great thread in the whole script. It was perfect to connect those two timelines, the present of a love story and the memory of a love story. It just came up in this hotel room in Trouville, within five minutes, and that was it.
Celine Sciamma's Full Biography
Céline Sciamma was born on 12 November 1978 in Pontoise, Val-d'Oise, France. She is a writer and director, known for Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Petite Maman (2021) and Tomboy (2011).