Totally. It's not only your future, it's your ability to express yourself. Vatel doesn't want to go to the court because he doesn't want to be in that world. He knows the price of it. Tim Roth's character, the Marquis de Lauzun, lives in that world -- he's a realist. Uma Thurman's character, Anne de Monstausier, is like a neophyte celebrity. She's got one foot in it, and is just beginning to understand what's up, which is why she's drawn to Vatel. She's caught between Lauzun and Vatel, and that's her dilemma. That's the dilemma of any actress in Hollywood. Look how cruel Hollywood can be to actresses. Her career can be over in 30 seconds. It's very like a card game. I've heard people say, "So-and-so is finished." I'll say, "But she's a great actress." And they say, "No, she's finished." You don't know why the door closed on them. It just did.

Louis XIV made his court like that. That's why I thought it the perfect paradigm for our world. When Louis took over the throne, he was 14 and there was this big civil war. He learned very early on that force of arms was not going to unify France. He knew he had to control the purse strings and not worry about his military's hold over the nobility. He pushed the bourgeoisie forward, and introduced the notion that one could advance by right of wit rather than right of birth. He created an environment of great instability where the only sure way to survive was to have enough money, or the eye of the king.

Vatel's escape from this predicament is a morbid one. How do you emerge from a similar dilemma without it ending badly?

In all fairness to Vatel, I'm probably more like Uma's character, Anne. I wish I had the nobility of Vatel, but I've got the confusions that Anne's got. I don't have Vatel's strength of character, that simplicity and greatness. I'm more like Anne because I'm between those two elements -- the virtuous and the venal. That's where I live. I wouldn't be alive if I didn't have that dilemma.

How did you choose the principal players for this film? Did you have Depardieu in mind from the beginning?

Pretty much. I didn't want Vatel to be too much of an aesthete. I wanted a working-class element to him -- with big hands, face and neck. Gerard has all that. As for Uma, I thought she would understand Anne's dilemma of being stuck between being a public and a private figure. With Tim, he has an amazing ability to present men of extreme Machiavellian qualities who are not evil. Lauzun, his character, would be running a Hollywood studio in our age.

Did you do anything special to get the actors to inhabit their characters rather than just those baroque getups they wore?

I wrote each of them letters or memoirs, which I said I'd found in the museum. I had them printed up rather neatly, bound in little books and given to them. I wrote them all in the first person from my research, and they were written with a slight bias toward the scenes they had to play.

Also, when we constructed the costumes, I had them made like pop star costumes. I wouldn't allow the costume designer to use the material she'd normally use. I took her to a shop in Paris that makes clothes for pop stars, and there were all these iridescent, shiny clothes. I said, "Here's the court. It was a court of pop stars. Every person in that court spent everything they could on what they wore." I got the actors into them very early, and gave them exactly the same spiel. When they were fitted, we'd have pop music going so they'd have that in their heads. I'd talk to them about Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, to give them a sense of how they should act.

About Vatel's feasts and spectacles, how close were your screen versions to the historical ones?

Ours were inspired by research, though designed with our own agenda in mind. Like the trees that spring from boxes, that was something I worked with the designer on. I took the designer to a garden and said, "I'll be Vatel, you be Vatel's assistant and I'll tell you what I want to create for the king." I told him, "The point of being the king is to make everything fertile, to make the country work. Therefore you come to a bare alley, and once the music starts, all these flowers sprout from nowhere and trees jump out of boxes. It should be like a child's pop-up book. Within 30 seconds, the king finds himself in a kind of enchanted garden with the whole court applauding." That's how the idea came. We worked it out from there.

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