Speaking with many young people, they act like their virginity is something you have to turn the page very quickly on. "It's done."

The first idea of Young and Beautiful was to have a young boy and to explore the sexuality of boys. But, I realized, with a boy doing prostitution, of course it has to deal with homosexuality. And I had a feeling it was too much for the film, you know, sexuality, prostitution, adolescence ... there were too many films for one film.

I think young people are aware, more than when I was young. There is such an obsession in the media of young people, about their beauty. The magazines and the fashion, all these kinds of things. They know that, and they use this power.

I had in mind a case close to my family, friends of my parents, who seemed to be the perfect bourgeois family, and a young boy, who when he was 17, committed suicide. It was such a shock. The parents didn't understand. Nobody understood why he did that. Everybody was exploring his life, trying to understand what the problem was. Everybody had a feeling that this guy had the perfect life: he was beautiful, he was clever... but he did that. I had that in mind, about Isabelle in Young and Beautiful, for the parents to see adolescents like aliens.

It's funny how people want to sometimes think that Young and Beautiful film is about all adolescents, but it's just the case of one girl. It doesn't mean all the adolescents are like that, of course.

Sometimes it's easier for me to do films about, and with, women, because I have more distance, I'm more lucid.

There is a kind of syndrome of girls who want to dirty themselves. They have the power. They control everything.