Christopher Hampton, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter behind Dangerous Liaisons, was developing a screenplay about the renowned French author Colette (1873-1954) when he began adapting her most famous novel Chéri. Written in 1920, it told the story of the doomed love affair between Léa de Lonval, one of the most celebrated courtesans of the day, and Chéri, the young son of an old colleague and rival.

“Colette has always been one of my favourite writers and I got very interested in doing the Colette life story because she had a tyrannical older husband and ran away to become a striptease artiste,” says Hampton. “Colette is loved and admired because she writes in a very individual and personal way and writes very sensitively about women. With some writers you don’t need to research much but Colette was fascinating and it was a pleasure to read her other works.”

It was the love story theme of Chéri that proved such a irresistible attraction for Hampton. “It’s a story of two people who have no idea that they’re in love with each other,” he says of the film’s protagonists. “Léa thinks she’ll educate this younger boy and then pass him on a wiser man, and Chéri thinks he’s landed on his feet with a beautiful woman taking care of him until it’s time for him to move on. They know there’s an end point to their relationship. But when it arrives they both realise that they will miss each other very badly. A rather heroic act by Léa liberates Chéri and lets him go but at great cost to herself. You suspect he won’t recover too well either.”

Of course, the early 1900s milieu in which the story is set was another draw for the writer. “This is a fascinating world, this demi-monde, which at the end of 19th century reached its peak but was approaching its decline at time of the story in 1906,” says Hampton. “This was a corner of society, the courtesans, who had amassed spectacular wealth. They had to stick together because they were shunned from the rest of society but they had very interesting lives, they were very cultivated and they were unlike any contemporary group you can think of. There was something very modern about this group in one respect because they were emancipated women.”

Although translating from the original French afforded Hampton a certain freedom in being able to pick and chose from the dialogue in the novel, the fact that it isn’t a conventional narrative posed a more taxing creative challenge. “Colette’s an impressionist, there are little bursts of dialogue or imagery,” he explains. “She can spend 20 pages on one scene but three months can fly by in a paragraph. At the start I found I had a first draft that was longer than the novel itself! So I had to ruthlessly prune.”

After various false starts, Hampton discovered that Bill Kenwright, top UK theatre impresario, had optioned the rights, just as Kenwright himself was about to approach Hampton to tackle his long-gestating screen adaptation.

“Christopher Hampton was my first choice to adapt the novel,” says Kenwright. “His first draft was wonderful but it was a real battle to get it onto the screen because it’s a costume drama, because it’s such a simple, focused story, because it’s so tragic and I would have thought mostly because the world of the Courtesan is probably not one that contemporary audiences know a lot about.”

It was Stephen Frears‘ involvement that finally brought the project together at the end of 2007. The director was riding high thanks to The Queen which not only won lead Helen Mirren an Academy Award for Best Actress but also became a worldwide hit for Miramax. He was approached by Kenwright and agreed to come on board within 24 hours of reading the screenplay.

Frears was attracted to the project partly because of Hampton’s evocative screenplay but also because it was a chance to explore an era some 100 years removed from The Queen.

“Christopher’s script was wonderful and Colette is a brilliant writer and the story seemed very fresh to me,” says the director. “It’s so beautiful, so old-fashioned and so frivolous and yet also so melancholic and tragic, and at the same time very clever. That’s because Colette was such a clever writer. She’s an impressionist. The story is a series of impressions and making them all add up into something is the challenge. It’s the most extreme film I’ve ever made and the most original story about people living in a bubble. These women were very powerful and had a lot of influence, but they lived in an enclosed society which was cut off from the mainstream. And as Lea tells Madame Peloux, they have to make friends within the profession because no one else understands them. And, of course, they’re also acutely aware of what happens to them when they age and lose their beauty.”

For a director who says he finds making films “very difficult“, he won the admiration of the whole cast and crew. Says Hampton: “I like working with him very much. I soon learnt that it was very unusual for a director to have the writer there – it’s too dangerous to have a boring pedant there all the time picking holes in what’s going on – but Stephen’s different. There’s an enormous depth and generosity to his collaborativeness. He has a very subtle approach when a scene isn’t working, when a scene is too long, or something doesn’t work. I’ve learned to trust those instincts. It’s often to do with words but also to do with concision and often to do with mood, finding a pause that will complete the music of the scene. In that sense, he’s very intuitive.”

Frears also lived up to all Bill Kenwright’s expectations. “I was huge fan of Stephen’s – two of my favourite films are The Grifters and Hi-Lo Country – and it was a thrill to work with him. You’re blessed when you find someone like Stephen; I knew he could make the film work. And he’s great with the actors; he does a lot of takes, to get the actors’ juices going. He knew exactly what he wanted and how the film should look from very early on. He was very painstaking and focused and was meticulous about the mood of the film. Really, he’s a master.”

With Frears at the helm, Kenwright was able to secure backing from two key partners, Pathe and Miramax Films. But the key to making the film succeed was finding the right actors for the roles of Léa de Lonval and Chéri.

Read About the Casting of the Film

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