I just wanted to react for I think Mr Koefoed is mistaken as to who actually did the movie. He said that Kureishi shot the movie and had to go to France in order to have the sex scenes being inserted into the film. In fact, Kureishi actually never thought that this particular book of his would one day be brought on the big screen. All of it is Patrice Chereau's idea (a famous director in France and if you care one day to see some of his other movies like "L'homme blessé" or "La reine Margot" or else "Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train", you'll realize that Chereau's fascination for a naturalist representation of bodies and sex was there well before "Intimacy"). Chereau entirely shot the film HIMSELF (and not Kureishi). Actually Chereau first read a french translation of Kureishi's novel (he did not speak english then : he learned it because he absolutely wanted to shoot the film in London, thinking - and he was right - that Paris was totally inappropriate to render the harshness of the characters'environment) and then he called Kureishi on the phone to tell him that he wanted to make a movie partly based on his book. The writing of the scenario was in fact led by three people : Kureishi (who brought to Chereau one of his short stories from which the sex scenes are actually derived), Chereau and Anne-Louise Trividic. Chereau and Kureishi have both said (lots has been written in the french press about the movie) that the WRITING of the screenplay (Chereau based half of his career on directing theater plays, he is very famous for that too : made huge things for the Avignon theatre festival) was very much of a "by six hands played" piece of music. Meeting constantly for the 4-5 years that the Intimacy enterprise lasted, Kureishi and Chereau became friends but Kureishi saw nothing of the movie until it was practically finished (you can find an interview from him on the Le Monde web site). He said that the film was a perfect depiction of London and of its harshness (that, by the way, does not appear that much in the book "Intimacy" for there the social background of the characters was much healthier) and that he was at the same time totally in awe and appalled by the final result, which in his view demonstrated that the film was really the product of a total cooperation between him and Chereau. In short, as said Chereau himself, Intimacy is really a child of what is called "European cinema", where an English man transmitted his view of London to a French man and where a French man succeeded to tell a story of passion in a language that was totally foreign to him before.
