Director Roger Michell, scriptwriter Hanif Kureishi, actors Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan and producer Kevin Loader gave a press conference after the screening of their film Le Week- end in the Official Section yesterday. Michel explained that they had aimed to show the positive and negative sides of a couple who have been together for thirty years and decide to go back to Paris where they spent their honeymoon to try and rejuvenate their marriage. Michel stressed that as they have been together for such a long time, their relationship constantly switches between love and hate and you can see right from the start that it’s really left its mark on them.

The novelist, Hanif Kureishi, who had already collaborated with Michel as a scriptwriter on several other films as well as on the TV series The Buddha of Suburbia, which he adapted from his own novel, said that they had chosen to focus on mature characters because they have usually had such intense experiences after thirty years and he had wanted to show that love isn’t just something that happens to young people.