The film has a 10-minute sex scene. The director made the actresses shoot it for 10 straight days. He made them redo a single 30-second street-crossing scene over 100 times before he was finally satisfied. The film won the biggest prize at Cannes for it. Four months later, both actresses said they would never work with him again.
The film is Blue Is the Warmest Color, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, starring Léa Seydoux (the actress from the last two James Bond films) and Adèle Exarchopoulos. In 2013, Steven Spielberg led the Cannes jury and gave the top prize to all three of them on the same stage, something the festival had never done before.
The shoot was supposed to take two and a half months. It took twice as long. They shot 750 hours of footage to end up with a 3-hour film. After one of those takes, Seydoux laughed. Kechiche picked up his screen monitor and threw it into the street, screaming that he couldn't work under those conditions. For the long sex scene, the actresses wore fake body parts made from molds of their actual bodies.
In May 2013, the French film crew union filed a complaint against the production. Workdays were running 16 hours but logged on timecards as 8. Overtime was unpaid, and multiple labor laws were broken. People had quit mid-shoot. By September, both actresses sat down with a reporter and called the atmosphere a form of harassment. Kechiche fired back with an open letter calling Seydoux an "arrogant, spoiled child" for criticizing him and threatened to take her to court for libel.
The woman who wrote the graphic novel the film was based on, Julie Maroh, had already gone public. She called the sex scenes "porn" and said what was missing on the set was lesbians. By the time the film hit U.S. theaters that fall, none of the three Palme winners were speaking to each other.
In 2017, Kechiche put his Palme d'Or trophy up for auction to fund his next movie. Its 2019 sequel premiered at Cannes with a 13-minute unsimulated oral sex scene. Audiences walked out in groups. Critics gave it a 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes. A source claimed the actors had been pressured to drink alcohol to finish. That October, a French actress went to the police and accused Kechiche of sexual assault. Paris prosecutors dropped the case in 2020 for lack of evidence. He denies the allegations.
Hollywood was changing too. By October 2018, HBO required intimacy coordinators on every show with sex or nude scenes, people who protect actors during intimate filming. America's actors union released the first official rules for them in January 2020. The first union contract for intimacy coordinators in U.S. film and television took effect on February 22, 2026, three months ago. The clause Seydoux now writes into every contract, the right to approve which nude scenes stay in the final cut, has become standard practice for most lead actors.